She didn’t like Christmas. She didn’t like the way her mother emphasized the real meaning of Christmas and the importance of going to church just as a way of covering up how poor they were.

Ijahnya Christian

So while her friends went off to Next Level, Red Dragon Disco, Rafe’s and Johnno’s, the only places she got to go were church, the Christmas tree lighting in the Valley and things to do with the Stingray Programme because they were free. Not this year though. This year, she was going to be most present at Suzie’s 16th birthday party on Christmas Eve. She had been one of the small circle of friends who had huddled every lunch hour to plan the party of the millennium. That party was going to be talked about for the whole of the January term right up to Sports Day. It was going to be a party they told their grandchildren about and the story would be handed down from generation to generation so that at the turn of the next millennium, young Anguillians of the 22nd century would be harassing their parents for a party like that. Everyone was going to be there – there was going to be a strict age code though. No one from Campus B could be there and twenty was the upper limit. No one was going to stop their friends from Campus C from coming because everyone knew that those young men would be the life of the party.

There were going to be a couple of surprises at that party too because what they had planned was a Peace Party. Unknown to each other, the rudest boys from the South Hill and Valley groups were going to be there and then a third group who had friends among them both, had set up themselves as the Peace Ambassadors. The plan was that the party would not end until those warring boys had signed a truce – a truce that would involve their children and their children’s children. Anguilla was just too small to keep up the foolishness. It took a long time to convince the parents that they could achieve such a feat and an even longer time to persuade Suzie’s parents that they could stay home but that they had to stay in the kitchen and just make sure the food and the drinks kept coming out but they were to stay out of the peace process for that was young people business. They didn’t manage to sell the idea of having a few beers though – the parents put their foot down on that one and they also won the one about having a couple of bouncers to search everyone coming through the door and hulk around with a watchful eye all night. That one was hard to swallow but it was OK because no one wanted to take the chance of having some idiot bring a gun to that party. Only one major problem remained to be solved and her heart ached as the day drew nigh. She had nothing to wear.

Everything she saw that looked like it was made just for her was too expensive and everything she owned was too shabby. The few pieces that could do couldn’t do, because everyone had seen her in them already. It was a real crisis and she simply could not imagine how her mother could even think, never mind suggest, cutting down one of her old frocks that she had worn once, to a wedding some time back in the ninety’s. A cut-me-down old frock of her mother’s to wear to the party of the century? Pure stupidness! But even if she had to go naked, she was not going to miss the party. Her mother was a really good seamstress and then she got to thinking about Panache Couture. That lifted her spirit because if Charla could design clothes and get everyone wanting to wear them, when she and her mother put their heads together, all the boutique owners in Anguilla were going to be knocking on their door. Plus, the dress may have been old but the fabric and the colours could pass. She and her mother got to work and soon she knew that all heads would turn when she entered the room that night in that dress.

She didn’t know how it had happened. She must have been temporarily insane. She must have been afflicted with Alzheimer’s at an early age for it hadn’t been until the day before the party, as she had tried on the dress that she realized she had no shoes. Every penny had been spent on her accessories and on Suzie’s gift but there was no way in either heaven or Earth that she would wear those dreadful church shoes with a dress like that. She thought she would drop dead from instant depression but instead got into her bed to have a good cry and to consider spending the remainder of her life there. She had to find a way to get a pair of shoes because missing the party was out of the question. What she did not know what that her father, always somewhere on the periphery of her life, had unwittingly become part of a new family of fashion designers in Anguilla. Both she and her mother had laughed endlessly at his collection of plastic bags. He had saved every single one and was excited by the prospect at shopping at the new JW Proctors, not just because it was a spanking new supermarket but also because he could save more plastic bags. He didn’t know at first what he was going to do with them but he knew that he was not going to contribute so readily to clogging up Corito with plastic so he thought he would design a whole carnival troupe’s costumes from plastic bags and he would begin by experimenting on the shoes.

Those shoes needed to be strong and attractive enough to go well with the costumes he had in mind. He had heated, pounded, molded, twisted, plaited, painted, stuck and shaped plastic to create the first pair for himself but somehow they had turned out to look like they belonged to a woman – girlish in fact. What he had made was a pair of silver sandals. Unique, exquisite, elegant, sophisticated were the words that came to mind as he watched his new creation. Luckily both he and his daughter wore size 8 and he had wondered if she would at least try them on but he wasn’t sure what she would think of them. When his daughter and his wife teamed up to tease him about his inventions, he was no match for them so there was many an idea that he kept to himself. However, as his wife got into bed that night and asked him to pray with her for an answer to their daughter’s problem. He prayed but he knew in his heart that the problem had already been solved. He waited for his wife to fall asleep before creeping out of bed and into the little corner of the outer room where his daughter slept. He put the sandals right on the little box table by her bed so she was bound to see them as soon as she opened her eyes and his heart soared as he noticed that those shoes had been exclusively designed for that dress. They were a perfect match and they seemed to reflect his teenage daughter’s personality.

Her squeals of delight broke the slumber of her parents’ Christmas Eve morning.

“Mummeeee! Daddeeee! I got shoes. I got shoes. I dunno where I get em from but I got shoooes!”

Mummeee leapt out of bed but Daddy just lay there basking in anticipation for he knew that day was his.

Now, when the story of that party is being told, everyone talks of how one determined bunch of Anguillian youths brought peace, and hope and love to the island that Christmas. And somewhere in the telling, is the story of how one ravishing Anguillian beauty, with a lot of help from her Dad, started the revolution of fashionable footwear, made in Anguilla.

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