Christmas Trees, Like All Fairytales, Are Dead by the Time They Reach Jamaica
By the time Christmas trees are imported into Jamaica, they are well on their way to dying. Brutally expensive, they occupy the center of Caribbean homes like cheerful corpses. My mother gets one every year.
I. Kempshot
My mother loves Christmas and any other kind of fairy tale. Unable to throw anything away, she has collected boxes of tangled, half working, multi-coloured strings of lights over the years. These she throws haphazardly at the tree, unintentionally creating a modern art piece. And tinsel—lots of tinsel. The tree looks like a disco ball threw up on itself, its bioluminescent sick dripping from each branch, until you can’t see that the tree’s leaves were brown and dead because you can’t see them at all.