You gave a soft loan to a close friend in September and he promises paying back by December 15. How is the feeling like if he thinks it is a gift or a dash especially as Christmas approached after the due date and he is still not telling you anything? You call him on phone on December 18 to say ‘Hello’ in a subtle manner just to remind him of his indebtedness to you and he starts talking about Chelsea and why Man U shouldn’t have fired Morino on December 17? Ei!

It’s bronyaaaaaaa! Some of the ladies have started being very respectful and polite all of a sudden. Even if you deliberately provoke them, they would rather be the first to apologise. Yesterday I deliberately placed an unwashed okro soup bowl on my wife’s pillow and she apologized to me!Hahahaaaaa! Ajeeei! If I am a man, I should dare do so again in January!

Long time ago in Bethlehem, to the Holy Bible sayyyyyy ‘Merry live for evermore, ….I can smell goat light soup! Gone were the days when we wore those paper hats and plastic wrist watches and ‘spess’ moving from one house to the other ‘begging’ for food and drinks. Our hosts mostly welcomed us with both arms and gave us Fanta, piccadily biscuits and rice & stew all of which we ate only once in a year.

We built our Xmas huts with palm fronds and nim tree leaves and drummed the 24^th night into 25^th December with ‘knock outs’. On 24th nights, whether you like it or not our fathers would give us small akpeteshie to drink to usher in the 25th. I often drunk more of the apio such that when my father got drunk and staggered to the right, I would be staggering to the left! Thank God such an initiation into the ‘Kiss the Glass Association of Ghana’ didn’t manifest in me or else by now, so so booze I go dey booze!

You remember the first time plenty alcohol entered me. The whole world was so nice. I felt I was walking on one leg. The other leg didn’t exist! I laughed even when there was nothing to laugh about! Eiapio? Noooo!

‘Try your Luck’ for balloons were in vogue. We used to tease our friends whose balloons got burst by singing the chorus ‘oyeoshikaetan…fiifi…hormorbayebo, tror p3’. ( to wit, you’ve finished chopping your money on burst balloons; hunger would kill you though only at a pittance). The translation here doesn’t make sense to me myself but once you’ve gotten the gist why bother me again!

My last time I tried visiting someone on Christmas day was in 1987 when I was driven away by a man whose wife made him angry on that fateful 25^th December.‘I was going to chop Xmas’bcos I smelt light soup emanating from there. His wife prepared sheep light soup for him instead of the other 4 legs thus angering the man. So embarrassing o! Hmmm!

The man beckoned the wildest dog in his house to give me a chase! That was when I chanted portions of Psalm 91…you would trample the serpent and the lion’…It took the divine grace of God to deliver me that day o! Those were the days the lack of desire to entertain strangers at Xmas started setting in and has waned aaaa till now as if ‘Christmas has been arrrested’ hence losing its beauty and joy.

NowadaysXmas, neighbours would not even pound fufu for you to hear the timtim sound; they cook nit fufu silently! They would rather kill a fowl in their room so that you don’t know they are preparing chicken stew.

Times have changed; children have nowhere to go apart from the beaches and the malls bcos uncles and aunties would say they are not around so don’t visit. Modernization now makes us think about only ourselves and our closest families.

Nonetheless Xmas in contemporary times can be well organized if you planned towards it well. It is like learning how to change baby diapers at the beginning for men;it is not a pleasant experience. The reason I encourage men to start learning how to do it early. Right from day 1, don’t leave it with your wife alone bcos at the early stages, the remnants come from mainly breast milk and sometimes baby food. At this stage, you can get used to it as the stench is manageable. You can now graduate into the older ages where adult food comes in. That is when your baby pooh poohs ‘light soup’ and you feel some warmth on your laps and it goes like yoooooo! But if you wait till the baby starts eating gari and beans, kenkey and fish, fufu and abenkwan with meat, and you have to change her diapers, you can be sure the by-products may be those of adults and, I suwear, it requires special grace of some nasal strength to ‘survive’!Walahitalayi!

That is the reason it is important to start saving money towards your Xmas early and for that matter retirement small small when your salary is small especially.Otherwise, if you have to wait till your salary becomes big, it becomes more difficult to save o, yoo.

Don’t worry if you haven’t given out any gift yet; we are all hiding in our small one corner! The good news is that we are enjoying cholesterol-free vegetables like ‘kontonmire’ to celebrate Xmas 2018. Good health abi? I just love Kuampa. The first time I heard their song on JOY FM, I said to myself, ‘this should be the theme song for Xmas 2018! So nice it is!

The simple things in life are the things that get us very far! See their instruments and their apparel – traditional, simple and straight to the point!

But you know many people get surprised when the prosperity they have been praying about happens all of a sudden especially at Xmas.

You remember last year Xmas, when my employer gave me Xmas bonus. I was driving around Kaneshie first light on my way from the bank in an excited mood. Purchasing power was so strong I didn’t even demand change for anything I bought while in traffic.

You know one of those guys who clean windscreens often without your express permission started cleaning my windscreen; I allowed it. I don’t begrudge them bcos they have created jobs for themselves. After all, how much would you give aaaa that your ancestral poverty cannot be eliminated! After cleaning the car windscreen, I stretched my hand and gave him a GHC20 bill and spontaneously the guy dropped the money as soon as it touched his palm and screamed ‘Jesus, the devil is a liar’. I was astonished and somehow understood why. He was not expecting GHC20 but 20 pesewas as the case has mostly been. I was only sharing part of my X’masbonus with him o. Apparently he saw me as a sakawa boy or that the money could not be natural. This was a guy whose daily prayer probably would have been to raise GHC20 from his ‘trade’ on that day o but see. That is how many of us behave when miracles hit at us.

I drove off and I am not sure whether he picked the money or not. If he did, he was more likely to do so with a polythene bag to avoid contact with the money,go to a pastor to pray over it. If he did not, one can be sure that that GHC20 bill on the ground would attract the forever-suspecting Ghanaian hawkers to the scene. Konkonsa radio stations and newspapers would broadcast the ‘mystery’. Social media platforms would be awash with tales telling the whole world how a sakawa guy dropped money and turned into snake and disappeared. Some hawkers would swear how they actually saw the snake fiilifiili and the snake just disappeared with a human head on it! Ei! people!

In 2019, may God do bigger things in our lives beyond ourexpectations.We receive our breakthrough today in Jesus’ name I pray! 2019 is going to be a blast. Even the Bible says ‘let the weak say I am strong’. You naaa you know you are poor o, but you say you would buy range rover first quarter of 2019. Just believe; it is the power of positive thinking. God can surprise you to faint.

This Christmas, eat plenty rice, vegetablesand fruits o. Ehernnn, so do some people mean to say that when you are eating plastic rice, you won’t know? Haaba. Social media go kill us oo. I still can’t imagine eating rice and stew and not realizing that what I am eating is rubber. Why do we believe everything? Well let’s be careful though. Just eat Aveyime rice with kontonmire stew prepared at home and play Kuampa’s on the 5^th day of Christmas alongside.

Merry Christmas to you all especially myself as 25^th December is my birthday – an indication that I am getting closer to pension!Hahaaaaa!