Christmas spirit needed year-round

DINESH RAMBALLY

A VISITING researcher once said of our country, Christmas is the true national festival of TT. It is the one event in which the whole national community partakes and unifies across boundaries of religion, politics and ethnicity.

The present generation of adults will recall that the festive season traditionally began in the last week of the Christmas school term. Bible stories, carol singing, class parties and sharing gifts marked the day. Children were treated to sno-cones, cotton candy, apples and food. Santa Claus visited on a fire truck, delivering gifts. We can be comforted by the fact that children nowadays continue to enjoy a similar school Christmas experience.

The Christmas vacation takes the festivities even further, including visiting friends and families. The characteristic menu for the season include pastelles, curry cutters, hops bread, various types of meats and wild meats, Christmas rice, macaroni pie, corn pie, potato salad, fresh peas, all washed down with ginger beer or ponche de creme.

The Trini dessert menu is equally quite expansive and includes sponge cake, coconut sweet bread, banana bread, carrot cake, black cake, rum cake and – my personal favourites – pone, paime and sorrel.

Without need for invitations, and regardless of kith and kin, entire communities still gather in neighbours’ yards, where boom boxes are positioned, filling the air with parang music. Christmas time is indeed sweet. There is no place like home for the holidays for Trini Christmas is the best. These experiences fill you with love and joy which can be shared throughout the new year.

Accompanying one’s parents or grandparents to shop for gifts for family members and others is just but a part of a transformative experience only felt during Christmas time. I cannot even begin to describe this feeling in these few words, so let me enlist the great Martinican poet, Aimé Césaire, from his Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, in describing Christmas sentiment:

“It was first announced, was Christmas, by a tingling of desires, a thirst for new tenderness, a buzzing of fuzzy dreams, then it had suddenly taken off in the violet frou frou of its great wings of joy, and then, breathtakingly, it would fall back down over the town, and burst open the life of the shacks like an overripe pomegranate.”

This Christmas nostalgia comes at a time when many families are grieving for lost loved ones who died as a result of the covid19 pandemic and/or were victims of heinous crimes. Obvious questions arise as to whether the children and families of the deceased victims will ever recover and move forward with their lives?

Can the respective families remain closely-knit to brave the emotional storm they have to endure? Can the extended community remain a whole and foster the joys of our once sweet, sweet TT? Can the families of the deceased divers (Paria tragedy) ever have closure?

The answer to these questions is that people, irrespective of the tragedies suffered, can indeed overcome and live their lives joyfully. But it takes effort, and they cannot do it alone, nor should they have to.

This leads to the question of questions: Who is ensuring that they receive year-round support and assistance? When a family is not a whole unit anymore, who is going to make the children hot cups of cocoa, and watch Christmas movies with them? Who will emotionally and lovingly support the spouses, now single parents? Even in those families where there are no children, one wonders whether the shattered pieces can ever be cleaned up.

Hampers, food cards, criminal injuries compensation, grants and other handouts will not do the job. As citizens of a sweet TT, we have to all be ready to spread the Christmas cheer throughout the year. Children, adults, people, no matter what their circumstances, deserve to be supported in a way that their childhood activities and lives are journeys filled with love, happiness and peace. Children deserve the experience of unwrapping gifts on Christmas morning.

Let us all in our own small way become a telephone hotline for these people to call and chat. Let us be a guiding hand for the youths. Let us together be the financial support where it is needed most. Let us always be our brother’s keeper. May our cup runneth over with love and joy that we may share all through the year.

Wishing everyone a safe and Merry Christmas and a loving and Happy New Year.

Dinesh Rambally is the MP for Chaguanas West