Feliz Navidad! A reluctant Christmas shopper’s tropical adventure

The worst thing about Christmas is that you have to go shopping and buy stuff for people you don’t care about – like your friends and family – because you know that if you don’t, you won’t get any stuff from them.

Anyway. I have fled Paris. Too cold. Too many people. Too much culture. After increasingly desperate calls to Costa Rica in which I whined and begged, Loinfruit and Bloke reluctantly agreed to have me for Christmas.

“With some fava beans and a nice Chianti?” I asked.

There was a long silence before she cut the connection. Obviously not a Hannibal Lecter fan.

This isn’t my first Christmas in the tropics with my daughter and her husband, but it will be the first spent with the in-laws. Not mine, obviously. The restraining order is still in place.

These are his parents and things are bound to take some kind of turn. For a start, they drink wine, which never ends well. Also, they are Belgians. Not the normal kind, from Brussels.

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These ones met in the Congo many years ago. Bloke’s father did or said something to upset Mobutu so they fled south under cover of darkness with their two toddlers, upsetting governments along the way, until they settled in Namibia, where they eventually upset all the wrong people and bought a house in Costa Rica.

They haven’t upset the authorities here, but it’s just a matter of time.

Loinfruit has made an effort this year, probably because her in-laws are coming. When I was here a couple of years ago, I woke up on Christmas Day to find a machete tied to the handle of my bedroom door. Sure, there was a shiny bow stuck to it, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was some kind of warning.

She has a Christmas tree this year. Bloke claims to have bought it in a nearby town, but I can see they dragged it from the bottom of their garden after it collapsed during last month’s heavy rains.

He says they got the decorations from someone at the local market but they don’t look right to me. More like something you’d find at a voodoo ritual.

Also, they have hung the name tag of their dead dog on the tree, which seems inappropriate. Especially since the dog was addicted to recreational drugs. He developed a taste for cane toads and was way more interested in tripping balls than guarding the perimeter.

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Then he licked one toad too many and that was that. I don’t know what to get these people for Christmas. I only travel with hand luggage after developing a pathological aversion to baggage carousels and the anxious people who crowd silently around them.

This means I was unable to bring many gifts from Paris, which they are obviously expecting. I did smuggle in some cheese but it was already klanking heavily enough for Bloke to remark on it when I got into his car at the airport.

So now I have to do my shopping at the hippy market down at the beach and hope they think I bought it all in Paris. Could be tricky. I don’t think wooden penis key rings are big in the French capital. And who would I give it to? The father-in-law or his wife?

Either way, the gesture would be savagely misconstrued and irreparably damage the festive mood. I suppose I could buy a couple of grams of psilocybin-laced chocolate bars. That might offset any offence caused by the wooden willy.

On the other hand, it’s probably best not to have a large phallic object lying around, no matter how ornately carved, if we’re all going to be hallucinating like a pack of junkie dogs.

There’s an old white man in a bathrobe who does tarot readings. Maybe I should buy a session for Bloke. Then again, fewer things would ruin your Christmas morning more than getting the Death card three times in a row. I would have to shout, “No! No! It’s a good card!” But it has a picture of a skeleton on it. How good is that?

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The in-laws are considerably wealthier than I am. Many people are. Also, his hands are bigger than mine but I have more hair.

He has a boat and goes out and murders fish. My fish-killing days are behind me. Not because I’m enfeebled. I’m just done shooting fish in the back of the head. Call me woke, if you must.

So what do I get a man who has everything? I guess I could call the Sars hotline and get him audited. But what if he went to prison and his wife divorced him and married me? That would make me Loinfruit’s stepfather-in-law and her father at the same time. It would be too much.

She is in a similar position, clueless about what to get for these people. She’s only known them for 18 years. I asked her, what do Belgians like? “No idea,” she sighed. “Pigeon racing? Tintin? Brutal colonialism?”

Even though we’re equally useless in the arts and crafts department, I said: “Can we make something for them.”

“Crystal meth?” she suggested helpfully. But there was little time for that. Besides, there was no guarantee they’d even appreciate the gesture.

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They, on the other hand, have many choices in what to give me. For a start, I mostly travel with my possessions in plastic bags obtained from a selection of grocery and bottle stores.

These bags are regularly forgotten in airport bathrooms and dive bars, which means all my possessions have to be replaced at least once a year.

Also, beer and power tools. There’s nothing more exhilarating than spending Christmas Day drinking heavily and chasing your relatives around the garden with a Black & Decker drill in one hand and a nail gun in the other.

Okay. That’s enough of that. Remember, don’t drink and drive unless you have an automatic with cup holders. As they say in these parts, Feliz Navidad!