The found and favoured of a Karoo Krismis

The origins of complex heritage permeate the Karoo like the roots of trees entwining beneath the earth on which stand our houses with their afdakkies and broekie lace. In many of the family histories are legendary grandparents, fusspot great aunts or black-sheep uncles who left what was once called the Home Country, and their legacy often remains in what is put on the Sunday dinner plate or cooked for the Christmas spread.

The festive season in particular is liberally laced with British Christmas traditions. The hot, hard liquor, the spiced fruit mince with its brandy kick; and some of the best Christmas fruit cakes you can buy are made by the hands of the same tannies who during the year turn out their preserves and pickles and jar them up to be sold at every farm stall in the land. Tannie Heyla Meyer was selling her beautifully wrapped kerskoeke at our local Krismis market this weekend, and trust me, there is No Skimping on the brandewyn.

But we can and do adapt them to our own ways and to the things that grow and live around us, just as the way we decorate our homes for the season has evolved from the ubiquitous baubles and tinsel to grabbing anything that shines and gleams with colour and character and turning them into the eclectic interiors we’re known for.

The Karoo is made for fairy lights. We string them up everywhere and, unlike in England and Scotland, we keep them up throughout the year. Twinkling little lights are a part of Karoo culture as much as the salvaged old cars or car parts we use as ornaments in our yards and the rusty tat we see not as junk to be thrown out but as wildly colourful decor. We stick them on our walls and shelves and admire them as one would a Monet or a Breughel.

Nowhere is the gaudy and the garish more at home than in our Karoo winkels and voorkamers. What in the Lancashire county parish would be frowned upon as vulgar is, to us, prized and honoured. We revel in the discarded and the distressed.

There’s a perfect example of this in our Karoo lounge right now. We do have more formal art and the memorabilia of our travels abroad on our walls. And every picture has a story. The watercolour painting of the Tudor Cross in Chichester given to us by colleagues as a farewell; the Bieres de la Meuse poster by Alphonse Mucha we bought in Prague; the Union Castle scene at Southampton harbour we bought decades ago in a junk store in East London (our coastal city, not the East End) for its nostalgic value as a reminder of the coastal trips on the Cape Town and Pretoria Castle liners in the Sixties.

But for every one of those there is something discovered, something rescued, something that fell into our laps; the found and favoured of the Karoo, like the wire guitars on our walls, one of which is now strung with colourful fairy lights for the season. We’re likely to keep it that way once the other decorations have been taken down and boxed up again for another year. We showed it to the GrandBoy during a family video call on Saturday and he turned to his parents and said, “We need to go to the shop and buy a Christmas guitar!” I reckon he’s inherited the Karoo Gene. (Before he was even born, during the baby shower when we were asked to write down what we thought the unborn lad would become in life, I scrawled, “Rock star!”)

When the family arrives later in December, this being our turn to host the clan, he’ll see our Krismiskitaar first-hand and we’ll all savour Heyla’s Christmas cake as well as Granddad Tones’ (that’s me) own handmade Karoo Krismis mince, because for the first time in my life I have made it from scratch.

It’s an old English tradition but I have given it a bit of a Karoo twist. All of the traditional things went in, with a bit of adaptation. There are currants and raisins, sultanas and dried citrus peel, fresh apples and orange juice, cinnamon and nutmeg, dark brown sugar and brandy.

But instead of suet I used persievet (rendered fat of Persian sheep), instead of almonds I chose walnuts grown in the Eastern Cape Midlands of the Karoo, and as well as brandy I opened a precious bottle of Omstaan XI, a white muscadel from the far Northern Cape which is blended from the best barrels of 11 vintages. But not too much; most of it will be savoured with the mince pies that will result.

But the coup de grace, dare I say, was the tablespoon of kapokbos leaves and tiny fluffy white flowers I stirred in. They’re indiscernible, but knowing they’re in there makes me happy; a little touch that for me is a nod to the Karoo I love. Kapokbos means snow bush, and by being invisibly in the mixture they make possible the idea of a white Christmas on the plains of Camdeboo. (Find the recipe for my Krismis mincemeat here.) DM/TGIFood

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