Christmas: A birth in the desert, celebrated with snowflakes in the African summer
HIGH above the tiles and the despairing babies and the despondent, flat-footed shoppers, three men wrestled with a gigantic snowflake.The snowflake was very heavy, and bristled with small lights which made it awkward to handle. But the men had a job to do, and they braced themselves against the snowflake and their backs took the strain and they barked instructions to each other.As they fought the snowflake into place, they sweated. One of the men didn‘t like having sweat run down his face. He kept ducking his head into his sleeve to mop up the droplets. But the others let it run unhindered. It dripped off the ends of their noses and caught the light. Falling stars made of distilled exertion plunged silently to the floor, and were wiped away by disconsolate flip-flops.When the shoppers had walked in, an hour earlier, they might have smiled or talked to each other or had a sense of where they were going. The flip-flops had plip-plopped smartly on the tiles. But that was an hour ago a...
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