There is a building technique that should make every Nigerian a little uneasy at this time of year.
Architects call it facadism. You keep the front wall of an old building, the part the street can see, and you take away almost everything behind it. From the road, nothing has changed. The windows sit where they always sat. The old cornice still catches the evening light. But walk through the front door and there is nothing there. Sometimes not even a floor.
Two researchers, Hannah Lewi and Andrew Murray, gave a paper on the practice an unforgettable title: Façadism as Urban Taxidermy: All Skin and no Bones. All skin and no bones. It is a phrase worth sitting with in November.
Because November is when many of us quietly begin building our December facade.
The Season Has Already Started
The flights are being priced. The concert dates are out. The WhatsApp groups are waking up from their long sleep.
"Who is coming home this year?"
"Are we doing the beach again?"
"Abeg, nobody should disgrace us this time."
The money involved is serious. A report by MO Africa Co, The Economics of Euphoria, estimated that the 2025 Lagos Detty December season saw about ₦396.54 billion in spending over 55 days, as reported by The Journal Nigeria. Whatever the exact figure, nobody who has tried to book a short-let in Lekki in December needs a report to tell them the season is expensive.
I am not writing this to scold anyone for enjoying December. After the kind of year many people have had, joy is not a luxury. It is closer to oxygen. As the BusinessDay columnist Oluwafemi Mayowa Olusola wrote last Christmas, "Celebration itself is not the problem."
The problem is what the celebration is being asked to hold up.
Two Things That Look Identical in Photographs
In a photograph, celebration and performance look exactly the same. Same white outfit. Same beach. Same raised glass.
The difference is not visible from the street. It is behind the wall.
Celebration says: this year happened, I am still here, and I want to mark it with people I love.
Performance says: this year happened, and I need nobody to find out what it cost me.
One is a house with a front door. The other is a front door with no house.
Most of us carry a little of both. That is simply human. The real question is the proportion, and whether we can tell which one is doing the spending.
Who Is the Audience?
Every facade is designed for an audience. Nobody builds a grand front wall facing a bush path.
So it is worth asking, honestly: who is your December being built for?
The cousins in the village who need to see that Lagos has been kind to you?
The old classmates who left the country and are coming back for three weeks with pounds and dollars?
The people on Instagram who seem to have arrived somewhere you are still travelling towards?
Or the version of yourself you promised, last January, would exist by now?
When the IJGB lands (the "I Just Got Back" cousin, fresh from abroad), there is a quiet pressure on both sides of the table. The one who returned feels they must look as if the journey was worth it. The one who stayed feels they must look as if staying was not a mistake. Two facades facing each other across a restaurant table, each one partly borrowed, each one admiring the other.
That is the strange thing about facadism. It does not only deceive the street. It deceives the owner too. Stand in front of your own front wall long enough, and you begin to believe the building is still there.
Every Facade Needs Bracing
A retained facade is not free. Once a front wall has lost the building that used to hold it up, it cannot stand on its own. It has to be propped, tied and braced with temporary steel until something real is built behind it. The engineering is careful, costly and, by design, temporary.
Our December facades need bracing too. The bracing is usually money we do not have, borrowed from a January we have not yet met.
Nigerians already have a name for the place where that bill arrives: the long January. School fees. Rent. The generator that chose the first week of the year to pack up. And the loan app that was so friendly on 20 December and is not friendly at all by the middle of January.
The same BusinessDay column made a distinction that sits at the heart of all this. Writing about the escape the season promises, it said: "It offers distraction, not restoration." Distraction is something you consume. Restoration is something that rebuilds you. A December spent entirely on distraction can leave you more tired than when it started. A December built around restoration, even a cheap one, can send you into the new year with something solid to stand on.
Design a December With Rooms
So change the question. Instead of asking, "How much can I spend this December?", ask, "What do I want my December to contain?"
Think of it as a floor plan rather than a front wall. A good house is not one enormous impressive room. It is a set of rooms, each with a purpose.
A room for rest: unscheduled days when nobody is expecting you anywhere.
A room for reunion: the people you actually miss, not the people you need to impress.
A room for joy: yes, the concert, the beach, the owambe, chosen because you will genuinely enjoy it, not because it will photograph well.
A room for giving: the elderly aunty, the neighbour who had a hard year, the gift that matters to someone who will never post it.
A room for reflection: one quiet evening to look honestly at the year that is ending.
Notice something about that floor plan. Most of those rooms are cheap. Some are free. Rest costs nothing but permission. Reunion costs a phone call and transport fare. Reflection costs one evening.
The expensive rooms are almost always the ones built for the street.
The Older Meaning of Going Home
Long before December had a hashtag, it already had a meaning. In many Nigerian families, especially in the south-east, December is when people travel back to the village. The point was never really the party. The point was return: to the compound, to the elders, to the graves of those who came before, to the people who knew you before you became whoever you are now.
There is something quietly radical in that older idea. The village knows your real building. Your mother knows which rooms are empty. Your childhood friend remembers where the cracks were before you plastered over them. Going home, at its best, is the one time of the year you are allowed to stop performing, because the people around you knew you before the facade went up.
[PERSONAL STORY: a December homecoming that felt like a genuine return rather than a performance, or one that felt like the opposite]
When December becomes a stage, we lose that. We carry the facade into the one place that never needed it.
Questions to Ask Before You Book Anything
Before the flight, before the outfit, before the "I'm in" on the group chat, sit with these:
- If no one could photograph or post this plan, would I still want to do it?
- Who, specifically, am I trying to convince, and what exactly am I trying to convince them of?
- What will this cost the January version of me, and have I asked them?
- Which person do I most want to see this December, and have I told them?
- What did this year really cost me, and is there a way to mark that honestly instead of covering it up?
These are not questions designed to make you feel guilty. They are questions to help you see what you are building.
A Simple Exercise: The Facade Audit
Tonight, take a sheet of paper and draw a line down the middle.
On the left, list every December plan you are considering, with its rough cost in naira.
On the right, beside each plan, write one word: room or wall.
Room means it adds something real to your life: rest, connection, joy you will remember, generosity, reflection. Wall means it mainly exists to be seen.
Do not cancel anything yet. Just look at the page. Look at the proportion. Then ask yourself one final question: if the walls cost more than the rooms, what am I protecting behind them?
Sometimes the answer is shame about a hard year. Sometimes it is the fear of looking left behind. Sometimes it is simply habit, the old "everybody does it". Whatever the answer is, it deserves more of your attention this month than the outfit does.
The House Behind the Wall
Facadism is, in the end, a story about what we are willing to lose in order to keep looking the same.
So celebrate this December. You may have earned it more than you know. Dance, travel, laugh, eat more jollof than is wise. But build rooms, not just walls. Spend on what will still be standing in January.
The street will forget your outfit by New Year's Day.
You are the one who has to live in the house.
