WE are on the threshold of Christmas, the oldest festival which has been celebrated in Guyana. It dates from the time of the first European settlement and the advent of plantation slavery. Christmas was the one day of the year that the slaves were allowed to celebrate and to publicly play their African drums and visit each other.

These celebrations of the 17th and 18th centuries had little or no religion in them but nevertheless were always suffused with joyfulness, relaxation and goodwill.

After Emancipation, the Christian element in the celebration became more prominent since most of the freedmen had become Christians, and had established churches throughout the coast. The Planter Class had generally become Victorian-style Christians as is evidenced by the St George’s Cathedral.

In the post Emancipation period when the country began to be peopled with indentured immigrants from Madeira, who were Portuguese Catholics, Africans from the Caribbean islands, Chinese and East Indians who were Hindus and Muslims, they all became enveloped in the celebration and each group gradually began to make its peculiar contribution to the Christmas festival.

By the beginning of the 20th century, Christmas had evolved to the form we know it today. It became a peculiarly Guyanese festival which synthesised the secular and religious and the entire population of Guyana, no matter whatever their racial or religious or cultural or class background may be, they all became ardent Christmas celebrants.

In the high days of Christmas which started from about the 1920s, nervous energy began to vibrate through the population from November when serious preparations began to be made for the festival. The commercial houses imported large quantities of Christmas goods which included various types of exotic foods such as Dutch cheeses, as well as various meats, especially hams and turkeys.

Toys of every kind of ingenuity were found, as well as the staples like snakes and ladders, monopoly and Chinese checkers. Colourful Christmas cards were everywhere, some of which were genuine works of art and which many older folk have kept in albums. All shops and homes were decorated with fairy lights and Christmas trees and snow and snowmen, not to forget the ubiquitous Father Christmas. The decorations were meant to create a fantasy; the few critics of today who criticise the decorations as not being “tropical” enough, don’t realise that the decorations were meant to awaken a fantasy, a dream.

Every family baked cakes, especially black cakes which needed to be prepared weeks before. The middle classes used imported Dover stoves which always had a chimney above the roof to let out smoke while ordinary folk used box ovens which were zinc boxes with a chamber for wood and these were usually in the open spaces to do their baking.

Most of the baking was done on 23rd and 24th of December and on Christmas Eve, Georgetown and the villages of the countryside were pervaded with the pleasant odour of baking cake.

As an essential part of the Christmas fare, people made jamoon wine, rice wine, ginger beer and sorrel which drinks were an expected offering to visitors. Christmas also had many sounds, among these being the masquerade bands with their special drum-beat. These masquerade bands performed throughout Christmas week and were followed by hundreds of people of all ages who danced or “flounced” behind them.

Christmas carols, later spiced with secular songs like Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer, were heard everywhere, in homes, on the streets, in the public transport and on the radio. The Christmas Eve church services were well attended and most churches were decorated with cribs showing the manger as well as other colourful decorations.

The Christmas week was a time when all houses were thoroughly cleaned, from the humblest huts to the large houses of the rich. Walls were repainted or sometimes repapered with artistic wallpapers. All furniture was repaired or renewed and were given new coats of varnish or French polish and the smells of varnish and French polish were among the ubiquitous smells of Christmas week. New curtains and window and door blinds were hung and the surroundings of the house were cleaned.

The happenings of the Christmas Season were a great catharsis since it cleared the mind and shed the burdens of the past and brought about a renewal which prepared everyone to enter the New Year with morale, optimism and a new determination to overcome all problems. It also reminded of a number of lessons which would allow one to live positively and happily through the New Year, once one adheres to them.

Among the most important were first, one’s belief in God would have been strengthened, secondly, the effectiveness of the message of goodwill and friendliness to all and lastly, the joy which comes from helping the poor, the underprivileged and the disabled.

Though Christmas of recent years has lost some its glamour and its very strong outward celebratory manifestations, it has unmistakably maintained its essence: It still remains a time of joy, of feasting, of colourful decorations, of goodwill to all and of national cohesion, of remembering the poor and differently abled and above all, as a catharsis preparing people to meet the New Year with strength, morale and success.