Christmas is here but what good is Christmas without meat aplenty? In my understanding, the meatier the X-mas, the more merry!

Some years ago, while working for another media house in another country, I was assigned to pay a prominent diplomat a day-long visit and then pen my tale.

The said diplomat placed a call through to me that morning, just to inform me and my photographer of the huge lunch feast that awaited us. He literally begged us not to eat heavy on our way to his home.

Upon arrival, he duly informed us that the entire household was vegetarian. "My family and I do not eat any meat. Meat is not prepared in this home except when there are visitors like you,” was how he chose to break the devastating news.

Then he was quick to add; "But in Africa when a person visits you and finds no meat, they will say ‘you did not cook at all’. In other words, meat had been included on the menu in a purely vegan household, just so as not to break an unwritten African custom.

There is just something about meat and the eating of it. Stories abound of men who allegedly count the pieces of meat before it is prepared by their wives. Stories that have long turned into cliché. If the meat is for dinner, the man will likely drift off to his peers or bar after the ‘meat count’, only returning home for the meat feast.

Woe unto the wife should he find that even a single piece is amiss! In most poor African homes whenever meat or chicken is on the menu, it is a mini-Christmas of sorts, and this mood will be rife in the air.

The kids will be very unusually receptive to their parents, helping freely with chores that they usually are forced to do. Actually they will take a shower, dress neatly and sit obediently by the mother’s side as she prepares the delicacy. Who would risk being in their mother’s bad books on such an auspicious occasion?

When the meat is finally served, more ‘meat secrets’ will be revealed. One of those secrets is that you don’t launch into your pieces of meat or chicken ‘just like that.’ It has to be done differently. It has to be lent some ceremony; you first eat all the ‘bad things’, and save the meat for last.

I am told that many a time, this behavior is not out of individual choice, but rather is a stringent home rule to be observed by all. This is common especially in extended families, which are synonymous with mistrust and suspicion.

If one child eats all their meat before others, a stray visitor could come around, only for them to leave with the impression that the kid was denied meat. We all know what sort of abomination denying anybody food is in our culture.

When it comes to chicken, almost every home has got its own unwritten rules as regards its consumption. In some homes, no one can serve themselves chicken before the head of the home has taken a pick of his favorite portions. Some men have specific parts, like the gizzard, that are their permanent reserve, save for when hosting an important visitor.