‘Culturalize’ ourselves

The sky was light blue, the few clouds still white, waiting to blush in the setting sun. Large flocks of noisy parrots flew overhead, emerald green against the azure sky, tanagers and orioles bickered for the fruit I had put out, hummingbirds darted from flower to flower.

And in the midst of all of this Glory, the radio is playing tributes to Frosty the Snowman and Jack Frost nipping at my toes! Singers are so missing the mistletoe and snow! Yes, I am hearing a little of the traditional music of Christmas Carols, but the mood being promoted is really about sleigh bells and frost. I know that over the past couple of generations Christmas has been culturally redefined for us.

The traditions which we once celebrated have been relegated to brief memoir snippets instead of being the centerpiece of family activity. We did not suffer this imposition of snow and frostbite and Rudolph, and yet it still felt like Christmas. The dominant music was Carols and sweet lilting Parang.

Today Rudolph and Frosty dominate the airwaves, and parang is being lost to soca parang, songs of gluttony and sexual innuendo.

For most of our history here we have celebrated Christmas as a Sunshine Thing, and we did not feel any shame in this wonderful reality.

We used to be proud of the rituals and the food and drink that were so much a part of us— from the wandering Paranderos to our pastelles and ponche cr?me and sorrel. So when did we turn to Frosty and Rudolph, and indeed, why? And does it matter? Why not embrace Rudolph instead of Silent Night? And of course we are free to celebrate the snow if that makes us “feel like Christmas”, but it is certainly a sudden break from our normal lives of sunshine, beaches and football in the Savannah at Christmas. It is a shedding of who we are because we have been inundated with the music of Frosty.

And this has been imposed upon us over the years. It was not in our past and is not in our culture. Our media, especially radio and television have thoughtlessly (I would hope it is not deliberate?) just poured packaged Americana out upon us at Christmastime, and our own cultural traditions have become overwhelmed and shunted aside, to be forgotten in the wave of popular snowmen songs, food and drink.

It is just another way we allow ourselves to be changed, to become more like “away”, and in our eternally insecure minds, a little less provincial or backwards.

The silliness of the Frosty songs with which we sing along is not even understood by us.

But we cannot sing a Parandero song! We do not know the lyrics.

Listen, I do not want to spoil your Christmas cheer, or your “feeling like Christmas” because you are suddenly dreaming of a white Christmas, I just want us to acknowledge that our feet are on warm ground and our children, not wrapped up like Eskimos, are playing on our lawns.

Could we then not agree to have less promotion of the foreign, the alien? And programme more parang, and carols, and what about carols on steel? How come we do not hear that? We so want to impress visitors that we can be just like them.

We mimic them, in our winter d?cor at Piarco, and in our Frosty songs.

But these visitors actually come here to discover us—our music, our foods and drink, our celebrations. When we appreciate our own identities, we will be proud of who we are, and share our charming customs rather than mimicking theirs.

I believe, that in this harsh dry season coming, as our money dries up with our water and our oil, that we need to turn inward to survive on who we really are, what we really can produce, and the artistic, cultural and indeed sporting achievements that can be inspired by us rising to the challenges of identity.

A country, a society like ours really needs to rediscover, “re-culturalize” itself in its core values to find the strength and initiatives to deal with the hard times, and the bitter post-election calypsoes to come.

Our media and the interests which control our media-- corporate and advertising interests-- have a huge role to play in redirecting the chaos they have created in the promotion of shallow mimicry in our lives.

Can we rise to the challenge before us in 2016?