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Afehyia Pa, Ghana Salad & Shots By Mame D. Adjei
We all have a childhood Christmas memory. It doesn’t matter how old you are, where you’re from, or where you live. There’s something about Christmas that triggers all the childhood, nostalgic feels. About a few weeks ago, I saw a tweet that read:
and it sent me down the rabbit hole of memories.
For as long as I’ve lived in Ghana, we , aunts, cousins, uncles et al., would all pull up to my Aunt Gina’s house after church on Christmas Day. I couldn’t wait! I would pick out my outfit the night before because, obviously, the dress you wore to church would not give you enough room to dance for the older family members to throw money on your head.
We would get there and, as anthropo- logically accurate as possible, the adults would sit on one side and the cousins, depending on the age group, would congregate at various parts of the house. The cousins that were old enough to drink would always sit outside to talk and laugh.I couldn’t wait to grow up so that I, too, would be allowed to drink Baileys with my jollof and chicken, instead of the malt us 10-year-olds were stuck with.
Our mothers would call us to come pick up our plates laden with all the chicken, all the jollof, all the Ghana salad, all the kelewele. Of all the “Ghanaian” special occasion foods, everything you could think of was on the dining table. We would eat and eat till we could no longer eat, but we still had to make room for dessert, typically cake and ice cream.
As we’ve gotten older, some of us cousins have become parents. Some of us are the aunties the babies ask for food. But, it’s still a beautiful feeling to celebrate together. We might be taking shots now instead of drinking Bailey’s, and the dessert options have definitely expanded past cake and ice cream, but we’re still making memories.
So, Afehyia Pa, readers. Afe sɛsɛi, na y’agye y’ani ankasa!
