For those of us stuck in the northern hemisphere, preparing for yet another cold Christmas, those sunny memories are all the more vivid. No dreaming of a White Christmas for me. No, I’m yearning for a festive season with hot weather and cool drinks, with Father Christmas sweating under his false beard and barefoot children gathered around him.

My paternal grandparents and their ancestors were from the Stilbaai region (now all buried in the cemeteries of Stilbaai and Riversdale), so as far back as I can remember we’d spend at least part of every Christmas holiday in what used to be a small seaside village divided by the Goukou river. 

Today, Stilbaai has been “developed” into an almost unrecognisable town, as I realised once again on a recent road trip. But the smells of those Stilbaai holidays of decades ago remain unforgettable. Somewhere past Riversdale on the N2, shortly before you take the Stilbaai turnoff at the strange sight of a fishing boat lying on dry land like a beached whale next to the road sign, you catch the first whiff of that odorous species of fynbos we used to call the “Stilbaai bossie”.

I still don’t know the correct name, botanical or common, of this plant that provided the olfactory background to all my Christmas vacations. Some of my family called it soutbos, while others believed it was renosterbos or arnosterbos. Or bokboegoe, also known as wild dagga, as some members of the Stilbaai Facebook Group maintain.

I turned to this group for an answer – and promptly fell through a rabbit hole of further possibilities. For the moment I’m going to side with those members who simply call the indescribable odour “the smell of summer holidays”. 

For me this is still the smell of good times, of lost times, of long-ago carefree times. The moment my nostrils were activated on the backseat of Pa’s Opel or Valiant or Ford Fairlane (the cars changed through the years, but the excitement always remained), all my senses came alive. As if I’d been sleeping all year, like Sleeping Beauty on the mountain that you can still see on the road between Stilbaai and Riversdale. (Well, with a little imagination, of course. Some adults take years to make out the delicate profile of the sleeping princess in the silhouette of the mountain.) 

And once my senses were awakened, every experience would seem more intense than at any other time or in any other place.

The first visual thrill was to spot the bright-blue ribbon of sea beyond the fynbos hills, preferably before my siblings, to be the first one in the car to shout: “I see the sea!” From this magical moment on my eyes were wide open and I was “married to amazement”, in Mary Oliver’s words. Until the end of the vacation and the start of the school year, when dullness and boredom became my everyday companions again.

Stilbaai beach and the Goukou river running through the town. Right: Marita van der Vyver and her partner Alain Claisse. (Photos: Supplied)

Sounds and tastes were part of the whole sensual package. The soundtrack was provided by the music we listened to on the beach, blaring from little transistor radios: Sunglasses, ooh-hoo, to cry behind. Sunglasses, ooh-hoo, to die behind. This silly song by Sandy Posey was the first seven single I ever bought, as a precocious pre-teen impatient to experience a holiday romance and a broken heart. 

I didn’t have to wait too long.

A few years later the Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations played in the background as I watched a series of surfer boyfriends more interested in catching the perfect wave than in declaring undying love to the girlfriend patiently pining in the Volkswagen Kombi. (They all had Kombis in the Seventies, with roof racks for the beautiful boards that got much more attention than any girl could ever dream of.) At night, at least, we could close-dance and smooch to the songs played in the Seemeeu disco or the hotel: Procol Harum’s A Whiter Shade of Pale, Rodriguez’s I Wonder, John Lennon’s So This Is Christmas…

And then there was the food, ah, the food. Maybe the sea air and all those hours spent on the beach working on my tan gave me the kind of appetite that made even ordinary food taste extraordinary. We never ate gourmet dishes, but I fondly remember all our favourite meals.

In the morning we would buy loaves of white bread still warm from the oven in a café close to our dilapidated beach house on the east side of the river. Our breakfast would be thick slices of this bread plastered with peanut butter and apricot jam, swallowed down with mugs of instant Ricoffy mixed with Cremora.

Nowadays I’m a shameless coffee snob, drinking only the best filter coffee, pure and black and bitter, but I adored that chicory potion with heaped spoons of milk powder.

Another culinary memory connected to Stilbaai holidays is the fresh mielies a local farmer would sell under a tree close to the bridge on the west bank of the river. We would eat the corn straight from the cob, slathered with butter and sprinkled with salt, the juiciest, sweetest, yellowest mielies I ever tasted.

I still wonder if I’ll ever eat a more irresistible mielie.

Mielies and butter. Bliss. (Photo: AndyM. from Pixabay)

Between mealtimes we would devour enormous slices of watermelon. The succulent red flesh and the white lining against the bright green peel, the three colours of the Italian flag, were the closest we ever came to Italian food in those days long before Stilbaai had pizzerias and pasta eateries. Ma would sometimes make a fancy-sounding spaghetti Bolognese with dried pasta and tinned tomatoes and minced meat, but she added so much sugar to the sauce to tempt even the fussiest sugar-addicted child that no Italian would have recognised the dish.

Seaside holidays included seafood, of course: fresh fish bought from the boats in the harbour or caught from the rocks by Pa. Also mussels and oysters collected at low tide. I preferred smoked mussels in a tin – I preferred just about anything in a tin – but I gradually learnt to appreciate fresh shellfish during those holidays.

And what would any South African summer holiday be without braaibroodjies and boerewors grilled on a fire? Also the lamb chops that Pa insisted on buying from the butcher in Droëvlakte just outside Stilbaai, because Oupa and Ouma believed the local mutton and lamb had a unique taste, thanks to the mysterious “Stilbaai bossie” that the sheep could graze on all day long.

I believed Oupa and Ouma, because everything in Stilbaai had a unique taste. I could have sworn that even the Coke we drank on the beach, and the NikNaks we gobbled up as late-night snacks after hours of dancing in the disco, tasted different from Coke and NikNaks bought anywhere else.

This is why I remember those Christmas holidays as enchanted. Summertime, and the living was easy. My daddy wasn’t exactly rich, but my ma was rather good-looking, and I had no idea how fortunate I was to have a seaside holiday in a country when most kids never knew this pleasure.

Now I belatedly count my lucky stars, and I feed on those memories to keep me warm during another chilly festive season in the darkness of Europe. So I raise a glass of good South African wine and propose a toast to our happy food memories. May we all cherish them, wherever we are this December, and may we make a few more for the years to come. DM