Robert Buddan
CHRISTMAS IS more than a universal celebration. It has taken root in different cultures in different ways. The Jamaican version is a mixture of religion, Victorian values, commercialism, and Creole practices. It might be that this last has become the least in formal heritage sponsorship but it provides a basis for tourism at Christmas time if we combine winter tourism with tropical Christmas against the background of our Jamaican heritage.
University of the West Indies (UWI) historians Brian Moore and Michele Johnson have written about the cultural heritage of Christmas in Jamaica and another colleague of Caribbean history, Verene Shepherd, has just been named Chair of the Jamaica National Heritage Trust, a fitting appointment. It seems to me that Professor Shepherd might thematise for the Jamaica Tourist Board the heritage, which Moore and Johnson describe, to make a good partnership of history, culture, and commerce work towards national development. It is timely too since in 2007 we will be celebrating 200 years since the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade and Professor Rex Nettleford is the UNESCO Chair of the Slave Routes Project.
What is our
Christmas heritage?
Moore and Johnson wrote that it was only in the 1800s that Christmas practices, as we know them, really began to take shape in Jamaica. Victorian values, centred on religiosity, family, and charity, were promoted to replace the Afro-Creole practices regarded as pagan and too rambunctious. These Victorian values were acquired by the middle class and wedded to a socially conscientious role of caring and compassion through gift-giving and charitable acts through church, family, and society. It was the Victorian puritanical and pietous response to the vile side of industrialisation and slavery. For many people, these remain the core values of Christmas today.
After Emancipation commercialism began to encroach on Christmas as a money economy arose. Merchants imported toys and Christmas goods. But commercialism gave Jamaicans a chance to advance their own economy by selling fruits, drinks and baked products in the markets. The grand market and Victoria market became central to the culture of Jamaican Christmas. It helped Jamaican commerce and the rapidly growing market of vendors, especially women higglers who, as Lorna Simmonds pointed out, were critical to the development of a domestic market and economy in Jamaica and particularly to the wealth and influence of Kingston's post-Emancipation commerce.
Commerce and Victorianism later became mixed in with pagan influences that gave rise to light and vegetation symbols (Christmas tree and lights). Commerce proceeded to exploit the Santa Claus figure without mercy. Of course, Christmas Day itself, the 25th of December, is a pre-Christian day of (pagan) sun worship that was selected as Christ's Birthday to win over pagans to Christianity by fooling them into believing that Christianity was not hostile to Sun worship.
As Christmas became more commercial and commercial interests became more interested in sponsoring Christmas events, there was less patronage for Afro-Creole forms of celebration. The Jonkunnu, for instance, had been in serious decline even before 1900. Two kinds of Christmas cultures emerged, the more Anglicised form associated with family and another kind traditionally based on community marked by Jonkunnu, street bands, set girls, sports and competition, fairs, and firecrackers. The latter was the Jamaican Creole form taking advantage of the outdoor celebration possible in a tropical climate and suited to the exuberance and extroversion of the Jamaican people. This form of celebration was only able to survive in the rural areas where policing was more difficult and where the 'ways of civilisation' had not fully penetrated.
HERITAGE AND
THE TOURISM MODEL
These forms of celebration not only fit the traditional Afro-Jamaican heritage, but they coincide with the practices most suited to tourism. In the first place, these outdoor forms of entertainment make the best use of the tropical climate, which is what tourists come here to enjoy. Next, tourists come for the entertainment and rambunctiousness that had been the bane of the Victorian model. Third, they want to see what is unique and different about Jamaican culture. It is in this sense that they would appreciate Afro-Jamaican Christmas and what other cultures Indian, Chinese, Scottish, and so on have added to Christmas, Jamaica-style. In other words, they really want the Creole heritage of Christmas, not the Victorian one.
The tourism model of celebrating life and nature is much closer to the mass Jamaican Christmas model of the same. It shares much more in common with this mass cultural model than it does with the Victorian model. The Victorian model is more homely. The hotels do not offer or cater to the Victorian model. The tourism industry is the best place in which to revive mass Christmas and to integrate community and heritage tourism with hotel-based commercial tourism.
The National Heritage Trust exists to develop and protect our heritage. The Tourist Board exists to market our culture as part of the tourism product. The hotels, grand markets, festive dance troupes and bands, the food and craft industries, all provide the market and economy within which this cultural meeting place of heritage and tourism takes place.
THE WAY OF LIFE OF A PEOPLE
Some people think history is a dead subject and that there is nothing to gain from it. History is about the way of life of a people and how it came into being. In this sense it is an industry because others want to know and experience how a people live. No culture has a monopoly on what makes life interesting and entertaining. Many people want to use their leisure time to share in the way of life of other people. This is where cultural and heritage tourism comes into the picture.
Professor Shepherd is the right person in the right place at the right time. The Government has announced that in 2007 we will celebrate the abolition of the slave trade two hundred years before. She might well have been appointed Chair of the JNHT with that in mind. Professor Shepherd brings something different to how we see our heritage. She is the leading historian on the history of Indians in Jamaica. She complements well UNESCO's Slave Routes Project headed by Professor Rex Nettleford. Indians and Africans travelled different routes to end up here and to contribute to the Creole model of our Christmas culture. Both cultures have a drumming tradition, fast rhythmic dancing styles, use of body decorations, and a long history of such street festivities like Jonkunnu and Hosay.
The Jamaica Tourism Board can use our Creole Christmas heritage to give tourists something more than a tropical experience. It can blend in the traditional forms of community tourism and our heritage with sports, festivals, fairs, parades, and revive our traditional masked characters like Kitty-Fly, Jack-in-the-Green and Cow. It can bring out the Christmas traditions of our ethnic groups and how they celebrate Christmas and New Year. There is nothing here that undermines the more private forms of celebrating Christmas for those who prefer to do it this way.
The celebration of the abolition of slavery will take place in May 2007. This celebration is a good focal point for a revival of other aspects of our heritage in the Christmas celebrations before and after. Hopefully, the JNHT will find a place for reviving our Christmas heritage on its busy agenda.
You can send your comments to Robert.Buddan@uwimona.edu.jm.
