STORY 110
Every December, something happens to Main Road in Somerset West that has been happening for longer than most residents can remember and that draws people from across the country who make it a specific reason for the journey.
The Christmas lights go up.
Every year, people flock in their thousands to see the Christmas lights in Somerset West. They come from everywhere in the country and drive slowly down the main street to admire the display, glimmering lights, bells, angels, reindeer, candles, aeroplanes, sledges and original creations that change year to year. The driving-slowly part is important. This is not a spectacle you pass through at speed. You ease down Main Road at the pace that a procession requires, with the windows down if the December evening is warm enough and you look.
The tradition is old enough that its exact origin is not precisely documented, it grew from civic pride and commercial energy and the particular enthusiasm that the Helderberg has always brought to community occasions. The switching-on of the Christmas lights, which lit up Main Road in the Somerset West central business district, is an old tradition spreading endless joy during the season. The switch-on ceremony became an event in its own right, the community assembling in front of the Town Hall, a dignitary saying the appropriate words and then the moment when the lights came on and Main Road transformed.
The Helderberg Lights Festival, also known as the Strawberry Festival, traditionally complemented the lights when Main Road was closed off in the evening and floats, parades and flea market stalls lined up under the lights. Strawberries and cream. This detail matters. The Helderberg in December is strawberry season, the farms in the valley and the surrounding hills producing the particular small, sweet strawberries that the Western Cape summer brings and the combination of Christmas lights and fresh strawberries and cream became the specific sensory signature of December in Somerset West. You ate strawberries under the lights. That was the thing you did.
The festival grew and changed and in its later years attracted the criticism that all successful community festivals attract when they become commercially large enough to lose their original character. The stalls selling strawberries and cream were replaced by cheap imported goods and the lights were not as spectacular as they had once been. These complaints are as old as the festival itself in its later phase, the permanent background noise of a community that remembers what the thing was and notices when it becomes something else.
But the lights themselves have been continuous. Every December, Main Road in Somerset West is transformed. People drive slowly. Children look up. The mountain is dark behind the town and the lights are bright in the main street and it is December in the Helderberg, which is a particular and irreplaceable thing to be.
Between You and Me:
Strawberries and cream under the Christmas lights, in thirty-degree heat, with the mountain dark behind the town. I think this is one of the more quietly disorienting things about Christmas in the Helderberg if you grew up, as so much of the imagery around Christmas did, on a Northern Hemisphere template, snow, fires, dark afternoons. None of that applies here and none of it ever did and yet Main Road still gets its lights and its angels and its reindeer, transplanted wholesale into a December that is bright and hot and smells of strawberries rather than woodsmoke. I used to find this slightly absurd. I now find it rather wonderful, a whole town deciding, every year, that the tradition matters more than whether it technically fits the climate. The lights go up. The strawberries get sold. The mountain, dark and warm, does not seem to mind the contradiction.
Historian – Harmen Bockelenberg
Next week: the Helderberg at the movies the landscape that cinema has used again and again, almost always for someone else’s story.
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