Becoming The Muse

Coffee with Oh Christmas Tree

If you were having coffee with me, I would welcome you to my tangle of words, tis the season to be to be jolly… well in just over a hundred days..

Don’t mind me, I never did store away the plastic Christmas tree I was gifted last festive season… so its still chilling there in the corner sans the tinsel. Now its past the point of a late Christmas display and has become an early Christmas… 120 days to Christmas 😂

I have been travelling in the past week, there’s been a birthday party, a wedding ceremony, a memorial service, a tombstone unveiling and funerals… Is it just me or the older you get, the more people die and suddenly you find yourself being the one everyone is looking at for answers, on what happens next?

One day you wake up and find yourself sitting by the fire and you are the elders everyone is waiting on to come up with a plan…. pic.twitter.com/REgcvKvk1n

— ~B 🇿🇼 (@Beatonm5) August 18, 2025

One thing about travelling though, you get to be a guest and people feed you like its Christmas, maybe its because we have proverb about family ties being fulfilled by food; ukama igasva hunozadziswa nekudya. The number of square meals I am having in a day, I suspect that the universe is trying to get me to look like Santa Claus by Christmas.. I mean my beard is already there, though my lil nephew says its giving Wolverine from X-men… 😂

If you were having coffee with me, I would tell you that the thing about life is that it goes on, tragedies happen, so will joyous occasions and other seemingly bland moments with nothing to write home about, that stitch our existence together and still, life, it goes on. Christmas could come early if you were one to complain of the fragility of the local currency, the ZiG, which is getting a much needed redesign and quality upgrade.

The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) has started on the production of new bank notes, soon to be introduced as part of the central bank’s de-dollarisation blueprint to transition to a mono-currency regime within the next five years… although such a forecast seems premature considering how the local unit’s stability is like a high dependency patient on life support, whose stability is sustained by strict regulation and statutory instruments, than standing on its own two feet.

Well, if I was Santa Claus, a lot of people would be getting coal for Christmas, starting with the parliamentary legislators, who are only vocal, when its time to ask about their benefits of office but sleep on debating issues of importance.  How can it take them five years to get around to talking about how the Minister of Finance seemingly makes up his own budget and monetary policies different to what have been presented before parliament?

Then there is the police which is highly efficient at catching culprits but mostly the insignificant ones whose pictures, names and ages are paraded in the media but those caught smuggling gold are never talked about.

I sometimes think about this joke about how if you want to get caught steal pocket change, but if you want to get away with it, steal millions… whats the worst that will happen, except a little bit of coal from Santa and your name on a naughty list and if we are being honest, such a list, would be quite the flex.

If you were having coffee with me, I would ask when’s the earliest you put up Christmas decorations? Anyway whats been happening in your neck of the woods?

~B