A very very Christmas

SALTFISH pastelles, curry goat pastelles, doubles with ham – why is the church silent on these sins against the faithful? These and other heresies stalked my social media platforms; videos depicting the varied inglorious ways Trinis sully cherished Christmas traditions I no longer practice, but still hold dear. Go ahead ye merry bastards! Why not put ice in your champagne or Baileys in your Peardrax?

If you’re there already, why not take the conventional aesthetic of paranderos standing on a wobbly stage propped up on oil drums and warbling through a horrendous sound system and transform it into a Machel Montanero-type fete in Paramin? How exactly do you jump and wine to parang anyway? Trinis are always so desperate for a party that they’d tote coolers to the reading of a will.

This column is already giving full curmudgeon. “Keep qwart old man! Go sit down and have another milk of amnesia.” In a minute. I’ve been thinking about the meaning of Trini Christmas…or at least what it once meant. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus is credited with saying, “The only constant in life is change.” Who doesn’t love a good Heraclitism?

Christmas traditions aren’t locked in amber; they’re not immune to the turnover of new generations. Talk to someone in their 20s or 30s about “Christmas grog” and they’d probably think you’re talking about some mythical holiday troll that kidnaps children, spirits them away to a damp forest and forces them to listen to Kelwyn Hutcheon doing a duet with Crazy.

Speaking of which, what qualifies as parang music today is nothing short of psychological torture; the kind against which I’m sure the Geneva Convention has some strictures. My only exposure to parang music, which is almost entirely some soca parang rap abomination, is at the grocery. Much of the instrumentation is wildly discordant. The crapaud-esque voices are gaily tuneless and the lyrics are laughably nonsensical and amateurish.

As I trawled the aisles for specials on near-to-expired goods and cheap Turkish-made chocolates I couldn’t help thinking, you know what would be better than this parang music in the grocery? An air raid siren.

A few generations ago there were probably those who thought Scrunter’s ode to pork and enquiries to Leroy about where his mother gone were an unconscionable bastardisation of the treasured parang art form. Today, however, Scrunter’s Christmas classics stand up like Chopin against the everywhereness of amateur, hobbyist entries. Hey, look! I make ah parang! Where’s the soca mafia when you need them?

Still, time marches on. Nothing stays the same, well culturally anyway. On every other front in TT, this society is a living fossil. I must change with the times too. Gone are the days of sitting with a mountain of sorrel surgically removing pesky seeds. I picked up a pack of dried sorrel thinking, what a wonderful innovation in local food processing. Nah, it’s made in Jamaica. Good for them. This will save me precious time; time that could otherwise be frittered away writing this albatross of a column. Just kidding! (?)

I followed the instructions – water to sorrel ratio, boiling time, etc. Then came the moment of truth as I sipped to taste. The experience reminded me of the first time I mixed Clorox with vinegar and woke up sometime later on the floor with mop in hand. My throat burned fiercely as if I’d been mustard-gassed in the trenches at Verdun. As my blackout lifted I also started to suspect I may have been a bit heavy-handed with the clove in this witch’s brew. My sorrel tasted more like caraille punch than the Yuletide beverage of memory.

Even though I do have a lingering affinity for Christmas traditions, there was no turkey for me this year. I tried to roast one on my own as a grown human man for the first (and last) time just a few years ago. The bird’s extremities were perfectly cooked. The rest of it, though, was so raw it would have been death by botulism had I served it to anyone. Would have been a good story, mind you…for those who lived to tell it.

Another Christmas disappears in the rearview; the heady cocktail of dread and optimism fills our glasses as a new year beckons. The season will always be for me a time of reflection, reconnection and appreciation for what one has rather than a yearning for what one has not. As much as Christmas celebrations evolve, I hope this one true constant remains.