Opinion By Prominance Sinomusa Khumalo
BULAWAYO – While adverts paint scenes of lavish braais in lush Selborne Brook gardens and families in brand-new 2025 Christmas attire, a different December 25th unfolds on the streets of Bulawayo.
It’s time we talk about the holiday that doesn’t make the commercials—the one where survival, not celebration, is the main event.
This isn’t about being a festive killjoy. It’s about confronting the reality that for thousands in our City, the holiday season deepens the grind of impossible choices.
The vendor in the relentless sun along 6th Avenue and Lobengula Street, hoping to sell the last of her doilies and tomatoes before Christmas Eve, knowing the price of a 2kg bag of rice has doubled. The grandmother in Njube who will stretch a single chicken across three days of meals for the grandchildren who came home from her rural home empty-handed. The father in Pumula who tells his children that Santa is stuck at the Beitbridge border, while he quietly calculates how to stretch his depleted ZiG allowance.
We don’t lack for these stories in our communities. We lack the willingness to let them share space with the glossy, imported festive fantasies. The dissonance is jarring: we drop a few coins in the church offering plate, then drive past the street kids along 9th Avenue without a glance. We speak of ubuntu and goodwill while inwardly dismissing the struggles of those in our high-density suburbs as mere misfortune.
The cruelty isn’t just in the hardship—it’s in the erasure. When we collectively pretend that a proper Christmas requires a loaded table and overseas gifts, we isolate those who can’t measure up. The parent who can only afford back yard manufactured diluted syrups and maputi feels shame, not solidarity. The unemployed graduate crashing on a cousin’s couch in Luveve is made to feel he’s failing at a holiday that’s supposedly for everyone. The message is clear:
“Your struggle is your own burden.”
But here’s what the relentlessly cheery narrative misses: the profound dignity in these unseen Bulawayo Christmases. There’s something powerfully honest about a holiday stripped of its commercial gloss. The mother who wakes at 4 AM to queue for cheap chicken cuts at Eziphaleni in Tshabalala, isn’t missing the spirit of Christmas; she’s embodying it—sacrificing everything for her family.
The laughter shared over a simple sadza and cabbage meal in Nkulumane isn’t a lesser joy; it’s a defiant act of resilience. The family that gathers not around a pile of gifts, but around a single radio for carols, isn’t doing Christmas wrong; they’re redefining it correctly, focusing on presence over presents.
This year, as some retreat to their air-conditioned homes in the Western suburbs like Hillside or Khumalo, we must ask: What if we’ve gotten Christmas backward? What if the “sparkle” is the distraction, and the real meaning is found in the endurance of the woman selling freezits in the Barbourfields heat, or the hope of the man seeking a day’s work at the Kelvin Car breakers?
The original Christmas story, after all, featured a family with no proper lodging, finding space in humility.
We need a more honest, inclusive Christmas narrative for Zimbabwe—one that makes room for both the festivities in Selborne Brooke and the quiet struggles in Mpopoma. This doesn’t mean cancelling your own braai. It means allowing your celebration to include a conscious awareness. To see the security guard working a 12-hour shift on Christmas Day in the Bulawayo City Centre as part of your community. To recognize that a shared cup of maheu and steadfast faith in the face of hardship is the ultimate triumph.
The lesson of this season isn’t that everyone must be merry. It’s that everyone deserves to be seen. Especially those counting their ZiG under a Bulawayo sunset, those working through the holiday, and those holding onto hope when the year has been unforgiving.
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