Anna Bucknor’s Christmas goats, J’can touch make holidays extra special
Published:Sunday | December 22, 2024 | 12:05 AMAinsworth Morris - Staff Reporter
Although preoccupied this festive season with a major renovation project for Christmas, Anna Bucknor, owner of Bits and Bobs Designs, known for its Christmas goats and Jamaican-themed items, knew she still had to create items for 2024 to not disappoint her clients.
So for 2024, although she was not able to create her popular Christmas goats —Bucknor popularly called The Goat Lady at Christmas — created new gift cards, mugs, and gift tags, with the promise to return bigger and better with her Christmas goats in 2025.
When asked why she decided to venture into Jamaican Christmas items, she said her mind was bothered by seeing solely American brands and themes being sold during the festive season.
“I lived in the United States for about 10 years, and before that, I lived in England for five years, and when I came home to Jamaica, the nostalgia of [a] Jamaican Christmas had kind of disappeared in the [American] snowmen and in the foreign Christmas. Everything that they sell here is very foreign-minded, so I wanted to do something that brought back Jamaican Christmas to me, so the goats were the first thing that kind of jumped at me,” Bucknor, an entrepreneur at heart, told The Sunday Gleaner.
“I went in the pharmacies and I saw them selling [Christmas] cushions, and I said, ‘Well, I am going to design cushions and Jamaican-themed Christmas stuff’. My cushions say: Welcome Christmas Breeze, Sorrel Season, etc. They are very Jamaican and everything to do with Jamaican Christmas,” she said.
Bucknor said that when the concept of replacing reindeer decorations with goats came to mind, she shared it with her father, Mark Gentles, and he went to work crafting them four years ago in time for Christmas that year.
“The idea for the goats themselves was to replace the reindeer that you see in people’s yards. Some people will argue that we have reindeer and they’re up in the hills, but goats really are what we see on a regular basis, and I thought it would be nice to create a goat family and have them laid out in the yard for Christmas just as how reindeer was,” Bucknor told Lifestyle.
“It’s a family affair [creating the Christmas goats]. My father is the one [who] cuts them out. We sat down, we drew them, and he cut them out ... My father is my bring-it-to-life man. Anything woodwork-like, I call on him. My father is my handyman-maker of everything. Anything that I challenge my father to make with his hands, he makes it,” she said.
They have a herd of goats: a ram goat, Rudy; a nanny goat, Nixon; and now, baby goats.
“The idea was that every year we would make a different one so people who collect them and end up having an entire herd of goats and they all have different names,” Bucknor told The Sunday Gleaner.
And when Christmas is over, these Christmas goats can be flat-packed and put away like puzzle pieces.
Bits and Bobs Designs’ gift cards are Jamaican-themed as well, with phrases such as Joyful Irie Christmas, Welcome Christmas Breeze, Sorrel Season, and goat characters on cards instead of reindeer.
Outside of bringing Christmas cheer, Bucknor has a cleaning and maintenance service called Simply Klean. The entrepreneur previously worked in operations in the United States for nine years before returning to Jamaica with her husband.
“I guess nostalgia [is why we moved back]. My husband, Gordon Bucknor, hadn’t lived here since he was 16 years old, and he is now in his 40s. He really wanted to move back. My parents were here, and I wanted to be around them, so that’s really why I moved back, and 2020 [during the pandemic] gave us the opportunity to do it with COVID, so we did,” she said.
It was after her return that she tapped into her creative side and registered Bits and Bobs.