Sha­had Ali

Press Pass Cor­re­spon­dent

Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies

The ma­jor­i­ty of us have a porch at the front of our house. If it is any­thing like the porch that I have at home, it is quite dusty, un­used, with a few plas­tic chairs ran­dom­ly scat­tered. The mod­ern homes that are be­ing built do not have a porch, but is now be­ing re­placed with garages that au­to­mat­i­cal­ly flip up to open.The porch by all means is a Caribbean aes­thet­ic that is now be­ing re­placed with large pri­vate doors that lit­er­al­ly al­low one car in and one car out. In the days when we had our open yards with noth­ing for bound­aries ex­cept beau­ti­ful trees and hedges, the porch pro­vid­ed a neigh­bourly in­vi­ta­tion.How could the lost ap­pre­ci­a­tion for a porch af­fect our tra­di­tion­al Christ­mas cel­e­bra­tions? Parang boasts of our Span­ish in­flu­ence on our mu­sic, with fur­ther vari­a­tions in so­ca parang. Parang bands that ex­ist in some com­mu­ni­ties used the open in­vi­ta­tion of a porch on Christ­mas morn­ing to en­ter­tain their friends and fam­i­ly. The drinks would come out of locked cup­boards, and fin­ger foods would be served to the parang en­ter­tain­ers.With­out the porch, there are no Par­ran­deros. Parang it­self has now left the com­fort of the home and is now be­ing trans­formed per­ma­nent­ly in­to a mar­ketable re­source. Even though it may have ex­ist­ed be­fore, it is now wide­spread and more pop­u­lar. Bars usu­al­ly hire parang bands to play for an en­tire night. Some may have en­trance fees, or may look for­ward to prof­its on their al­co­holic drinks. These events are not on­ly lu­cra­tive for bar own­ers, but al­so the food ven­dors in the com­mu­ni­ty.

I have recog­nised that be­cause every­thing is be­ing com­mer­cialised and in­flu­enced by west­ern cul­ture, our prac­tices and norms are chang­ing. Christ­mas is not what it used to be. One might be quick to ar­gue that our so­ci­ety is not what it was and thus our cus­toms were man­dat­ed to change. This of course, is a sub­stan­tial de­fense for pri­vatis­ing our lives and arm­ing our homes with state-of-the-art alarm sys­tems. How­ev­er, sim­ple so­cial mores such as 'Good Morn­ing' and 'Good Af­ter­noon' have been com­plete­ly dis­card­ed – such things in my opin­ion can­not be sub­stan­ti­at­ed. I won­der how many of us would wish our neigh­bours 'Mer­ry Christ­mas' or would we pre­fer to be po­lit­i­cal­ly cor­rect and say 'Hap­py Hol­i­days'?The com­mer­cial porch that now takes the form of a garage that pro­tects over ex­pen­sive cars is now the true mean­ing of Christ­mas. The on­ly thing that can play parang in these mod­ern day porch­es are Mer­cedes Ben­zs and BMWs. One can on­ly hope with lux­u­ri­ous in­te­ri­ors and top of the line speak­er sys­tems, the true Tri­ni Christ­mas cheer can be felt through­out the en­tire home as it em­anates from the mod­ern day porch.