THOUGH Easter is only a brief season, it is, or was, more creative on a constructive, Fine Art level than the various crafts and decorations associated with a Guyanese Christmas. Of course, we are justified in speaking of a Guyanese kite culture by looking back over decades of life in British Guiana and Independent Guyana. Culture, whether on a group or individual level, is the accumulation of styles, methods, processes, productions, which only achieve human meaning by the creativity it generates in its participants.
The kite remains one of the last examples of a non-utilitarian, intelligently structured art on a mass scale in Guyanese society. Because its value is not in the utilitarian category of mundane commercial use, like so many other crafts in Guyana today, but rather in the domain of conceptual and conjunctive atmospheric or spatial use, its very process of production, especially on an individual or personal level, involves the maker in thought, precision, order, structure, and combined contrasts, which, as a mental discipline, has social and personal value far beyond the ephemeral Easter season of kite flying.

Development
The development of Guyanese kite culture is rooted in the early frugal self-help skills of early 20th Century life in British Guiana. It was the six-sided Oriental kite format which inspired Guyanese kite culture on a broad scale, and provided the best opportunities for invention, innovation and addition, both within its format and upon it.
Because the frugal economic lifestyle of colonial and early Independent Guyana was not dominated by massive pre-packaged consumerism, the door was left open for Guyanese to develop multi-talents in areas that today have stagnated, or regressed, due to reliance on the commerce of pre-packaged imported objects, and therefore less motivation, exercise, and interest in local creativity and productivity, where levels of amateur and professional exploration occurs.

Kite culture
In Guyana’s recent past, the Easter season ushered in a flurry of creative activity among households. Among children, including girls, the fact that school was out meant that an entire day, or days, could be spent in finding the ingredients and concentration necessary for kite- making.
Kites themselves were divided into male and female styles; the male carried a nose-bridge with a thin bull on the taut string behind which made the kite sing, while the female was a flat kite, with no bull, though perhaps lots of colourful frills, and flown at a short distance.
There were less female kites than male because there were less girls obsessed with the various skills of making and flying kites. However, kites helped early bonding and courtship of boys and girls, especially in closely knit communities where neighbourhood girls noted the beauty and efficiency of an individual boy’s kite as they enjoyed the season in groups.
Creativity in Guyanese kite culture is linked to self-reliance rather than consumerism. The child who learns to take three or four pointers from a pointer broom; measure and place them at equal lengths; find their centre and secure it with a pin; use thread to frame the kite’s outer edges; cuts paper, stars, bulls, frills, flaps, and makes loops etc, is involved in self-discipline that they will need as adults.
At the end of an entire day trying to make a frame, find a piece of bamboo to bend for a nose, scraping together fine change for papers and gum-Arabic at the drugstore etc, growing boys feel a sense of accomplishment, for which their finished kite products should be noticed  by family members, neighbours, friends, etc,  and complimented.

Kite-making
The making of kites in the past involved much detail and diverse styles; this added to the excitement of kite-watching on the seawall and sports grounds. The self-creative diversity of Guyanese kite culture made it the largest Abstract Art exhibition in the sky.
The root of the kite is its frame; its flexibility, depending on choice and preparation of wood. I remember my father (our family never bought kites; they were given as gifts made by male family-friends, or made by my father, my brother, or myself) one Easter when I was about five or six, sitting me down beneath our house to watch him make my kite.
He casually broke out one of the four or five-inch-wide slats of an old blue cradle abandoned beneath the house, and began splitting it lengthways. The wood split almost in a straight line. He shaved each strip low with a sharp knife until no paint was left; the raw wood was light-brown in colour, with dark-brown meandering veins, and it had a beautiful aroma.
There were two popular local kite papers related, significantly, to shops and commerce. One was smooth brown or ochre store-paper (whose bulls sang the best), and the other was white cheese paper. My kite was of white cheese paper. My old-man cut a square piece of heavy, ultramarine blue glossy kite paper, folded it, and began to cut out shapes from its edges and middle without any specific design in mind, he said.
When he opened the paper, it was an abstract design which he tilted and pasted at my kite’s centre as a diamond shape. He added half-moon flaps in three or four colours from thin, bright tissue kite-paper, and frills in the same colours at the kite’s two upper sides.
It is half-moon flaps and frills which bring colour and exuberance to the sky as colours flutter kinetically in the wind. Later, after repeated flying in all sorts of weather, flaps and frills are frayed and eaten away by the atmosphere, and you have a veteran kite. They become close to us, and we are tempted to keep them for next year; but before the year is out, we feel the urge coming on again to make another entirely new kite.
Like this Guyanese kite culture, symbolizing the resurrection of Christ Easter represents never dies.