KEVIN BALDEOSINGH
?Contrary to popular belief, it is Christmas, not Carnival, which is the most popular cultural celebration in Trinidad and Tobago.
Carnival only seems dominant in T&T's social landscape because it is a public event that has State support, whereas Christmas celebrations are private (except, of course, for government ministers who host Xmas parties at venues they have deemed illegal).
But a 1994 survey by UWI sociologist Roy McCree found that over 80 per cent of the population marked Christmas, as compared to just 66 per cent who watched mas.
Indeed, the gap is even wider than this total percentage suggests, since 80 per cent of both Afro-and-Indo-Trinidadians decorate their homes for Xmas and accept invitations to other people's homes.
For Carnival, by contrast, a mere five per cent of Afros and four per cent of Indos play mas, while nearly 20 per cent don't even watch the parade.
If anything has changed in the past 20 years since McCree's survey (because, of course, no UWI academic has done any follow-up) it is likely that Carnival has become less popular, whereas Xmas has not declined at all if traffic jams in the past week are any indicator.
As an atheist, I am annually asked by at least one person how I celebrate Christmas. It is, to me, an odd question.
First, the questioner assumes that Christmas is not only defined, but confined by its Christian antecedents. This is untrue both historically and socially.
Historically, as even uneducated people now know, Xmas is a festival with pagan roots which originally marked the resurrection of the Sun God, and which was adopted by the early Christian church in order to facilitate conversion.
Secondly, Christmas is a time of family and friendship, so people who ask me that question are implying that atheists are intrinsically misanthropic, as though human bonding depends on shared beliefs in the supernatural.
In any case, I grew up in an extended family environment where even my Hindu relatives put up a Christmas tree.
Naturally, I found nothing unusual in this as a child, and as an adult I still don't. As far as I know, the only group in T&T who don't celebrate Xmas are fundamentalist Christians, because of the festival's aforementioned roots and because their Bible says not to celebrate anyone's birth. And, whatever their other faults, religious fundamentalists have the virtue of consistency.
My usual response to this question, therefore, is that Xmas is a secular festival (which, as a writer, I indicate by writing the word in its abbreviated form). McCree, however, like most UWI academics lets ideology get in the way of data.
"It is interesting but not surprising to note that of all the cultural forms, it was Christmas which showed the greatest level of involvement across the various race/ethnic groups," he writes in his paper Ethnicity in Cultural Festivals in T&T, but then goes on to attribute this to the "historical dominance of Christianity, and acculturation to European-derived cultural forms."
But it is more helpful to look to psychology rather than politics in order to explain the ubiquity of Xmas celebrations.
Thus, as a festival defined by consumption, Xmas is an appropriate vehicle for the Trini penchant for cooking and imbibing and liming.
Carnival also facilitates the last two habits, but Xmas has a key feature that Carnival lacks: the exchange of gifts.
This is the core reason Xmas has become a shared cultural event in T&T.
Unlike other religion-based occasions such as Divali and Eid, gift giving is a fundamental feature of Xmas. In a 1976 experiment, researchers Phillip Kunz and Michael Woolcott sent Christmas cards to a random sample of 578 Americans.
About one-fifth of the recipients sent cards to the researchers, whom they didn't know. Kunz repeated the experiment in 2000, getting a similar response rate.
The renowned social psychologist Robert B Cialdini, in his classic 1984 book Influence called this the rule of reciprocation.
"The rule says that we should try to repay, in kind, what another person has provided us," Cialdini writes, noting that the rule is universal to all human societies.
Indeed, the rule is even exploited by firms in order to secure profits.
Science writer Matt Ridley in The Origins of Virtue (1996) notes that "At any one time in Britain, about seven to eight percent of the economy is devoted to producing articles that will be given away as gifts.
In Japan the figure is probably higher. It is a largely recession-proof industry as proved by the eagerness of manufacturers of refrigerators and cookers diversified in recent decades into goods such as toasters and coffee-makers, items whose sales are dominated by the wedding and Christmas markets.
"They explicitly did so as a hedge against recessions."
So gifts are a double-edged blade. People give them to one another to demonstrate their affection, or they do so to impose obligations on people they want something from.
It can even be both. And, since Xmas allows this expression of both positive and negative impulses, it is no surprise that it should be the defining cultural event in this place.
KEVIN BALDEOSINGH is a professional writer, author of three novels, and co-author of a History textbook.
