Every Christmas, no matter where we were in the world, we had to go to the village to spend time with my grandparents. It was a tradition mama (my grandma) had instilled in her children over the years; and as her grand-kids, we were born into it.
Our village home was a 5-bedroom building with two bathrooms, and a kitchen with 2 detached buildings (a special kitchen and toilet). A room each for baba, mama, girls, boys and guests completed the sleeping arrangement in this "grand habitat" but the grandkids always ended up sleeping on matresses in the living room because we always had games to play, dramas to act and gist to give all through the night. While the rooms were not en-suite, the two bathrooms were surely decent enough to serve the population without awaiting-bath queues. Jealous yet? Don’t be please. By bathrooms, I don’t mean the regular bathroom that also houses a toilet bowl for "you know what". We used to do 'the-do' in the toilet outside. The bathrooms were what the Yorubas call baluwe - just for washing the body. We also had an additional bathroom which was built with corrugated zinc roofing sheets outside the house.
Most people's favorite room in a home is the kitchen and that's not different in my case. It is not just my love for cooking, but also my love for amebo (juicy gossip) that makes the kitchen my favourite spot. The kitchen in the house was quite useless to me though, it was used to keep cooked food, water, spices, pots, cutlery and stoves but our special kitchen, my special kitchen was where business went down.
We had to walk outside where some "aproko" chickens and goats welcomed us to the external structures. The gazebos, a grill/barbeque stand, games corner, swimming pool...errrm...ok, none of that but there were 'sha' structures, the toilet, zinc bathroom and the special kitchen in the form of a thatched-roof hut where the real cooking took place. I mean proper Benue, grinding stone, fire wood, smokey, cooking. Chai, my red eyes! While my aunts, mum and grandma were cooking, we would beg them to roast a small tuber of yam for us to eat with palm/groundnut oil as an appetizer then hang around to run errands and listen to amebo.
There was a Julie-mango tree in the middle of the compound we used to climb in the afternoons then sit/lie under in the evenings while the adults told us Tiv 'tales by moonlight'. At the back of the house though, we had a large, bare, expanse of land where we had a battle of the sexes - football style. Every 24th or 26th of December, about 15 of us females would play a match against just 4 of the males and when we won - like we always did - we would run around the house chanting (depending on the scores) " 4 - 0, kokoriko, hey! kokoriko, hey!" my foot never touched the ball on the field but i was always in the front line of the victory run.
This is just a glimpse of how we lived during the Christmas holidays and razz as it may all sound, I loved those days. I miss those days. Family is everything and though sometimes they seem to make life miserable for us, they do what they do because they love us and know that when the spotlight fades out they will still be there, loving us.
