That obsession with flowers at Christmas…
By Linda Rutherford
Guyana Chronicle
December 21, 2003
`To me, they make the home look better, because of all the different colours. They also help bring out the beauty in your curtains. I certainly like my flowers to match my curtains.’ - Cicely
JUST as we’ll never know for sure with whom the art of duplicating them really originated, whether it was indeed the Italians or the French, or if we need look even further back in time to the Romans or Egyptians, so too we’ll never be able to fathom this seemingly senseless obsession among women with flowers, particularly at this time of year.
Cicely, who has been into the business of floral arrangements for the past five years and is an inveterate homemaker, seems to think it all has to do with colour and symmetry.
As she reasoned, with characteristic simplicity: “To me, they make the home look better, because of all the different colours. They also help bring out the beauty in your curtains. I certainly like my flowers to match my curtains.”
Turns out, she’s right: It certainly does have to do with colour, as we found out Friday during a visit to ‘Collections’ on Water Street which happens to be just one of the many wholesale/retail outlets for imported artificial flowers in the city.
This was about an hour or so before the late-afternoon fire which swept upper Water Street, incurring millions of dollars in losses and putting scores on the breadline at a time when people are trying to put a brave face on things and keep up with tradition in spite of the tight economic situation.
According to the manager there, Ms. Dian Balram, the accent this year is on brightly-coloured blooms like your reds, and burgundy and orange. Peaches and pinks are also popular, but not so your pastels, she said. They’re taking a longer time to go.
The larger blooms are extremely large this year. But this is nothing new, Balram said. It’s a throw-back from last year, when they first came on the local market. The only thing different, she said, is the choice of colour and variety. Whereas last year, people tended to go for the velvety type in bold colours, this year they’re looking at the plain, earthy variety, such as your creams and various shades of brown. And bronze.
Again, most people seem to be going for what they call the ‘hanging basket’ types, which makes good economic sense since they come in a cluster with one huge central stem so as to make anchorage easier.
New this year, however, is an incongruous mix of roses on miniaturised trunks of regular trees, some gnarled, others encrusted with make-believe moss and sprouting fresh young leaves in places to make them look like the real `macoy’.
Incongruous or not with their bonsai-like appearance, Balram said they are going equally as fast as the regular flowers, mainly because they make a good substitute for the traditional Christmas Tree since they can be strung up with your usual fairy lights as well.
Business, she said, began to pick up around last Saturday. She rather suspects that it coincided with when people began receiving their bonuses and other incentives. Then, on the other hand, she said, Guyanese are famous for waiting until the last minute to do their Christmas shopping, which does not make it easy to gauge the mood this year.
Heading over to Robb Street was a revelation, since it is there that we came across blooms in the most unlikely of colours.
Now! Whoever heard of green roses! Or blue ones for that matter!
Well, you certainly haven’t been to Fantasy Imports, or its neighbour, BCJ Variety Store. We also came across something called ‘Dry Looks’, essentially bundles of a variety of dried floral creations, which are said to be going like hot cakes.
Curious enough, almost everyone we came across in those two stores and along Robb Street had some sort of flower among their shopping, even if it was just a sprig.
Meanwhile, those of us whose pockets are feeling the pinch this year and cannot afford such luxuries as new flowers, are washing last year’s purchases and praying like hell that the rain won’t fall so they can dry in time for Christmas Eve, which has traditionally been the time most people do their ‘putting away’ as the act of decorating for the season is sometimes called.
Almost everywhere you turned over the last two weeks or so, there have been flowers hanging upside-down (by their stems, of course) on clothes-lines, jostling for space and an equal chance at the sun with myriads of stuffed toys, blinds, chair backs and all the other decorative paraphernalia associated with the season.
That’s the beauty about silken flowers, in that not only are they long-lasting and washable, but they are also colour-fast, which is so unlike the hard-plastic, wax-like variety of a few years ago which tended to fade and go brittle with time, and to lose their colour if exposed to a tad too much sun.
But you’ve got to hand it to them; there was no beating their gorgeous smell when new, which rivaled, ‘neck and neck’, with that of new linoleum, which is something that is slowly making a come-back, fresh paint and freshly-baked bread.
And don’t forget how heavenly it was to catch a whiff of the makings of garlic pork and pepperpot and black cake, all traditional Christmas fare, as you passed by a neighbour’s house.
Still happens these days.
Have a ‘Feliz Navidad’ just the same, and a ‘Prospero Ano Nuevo’.