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Confession: I hate Christmas. I know this officially makes me a Scrooge, a Grinch, and an otherwise miserable human being, but I can't help it. I have no Christmas spirit and if it weren't for the return of the NBA and the 10 days off in a row I'd be preparing to anesthetize myself right now to get through it. Christmas annoys me and if I could I'd just skip it.

The one bright side to the holiday season is that it brings the latent Trini out of me. For most of the year I live in that grey area between being Canadian and being Trinidadian, never really skewing to one side or the other. Unlike most Canadians I firmly believe in beating my children. But unlike Trinis, I don’t wait until it’s -10 degrees outside to turn on my heat. I end most of my sentences with eh (Canadian) and I steupse loudly when someone pisses me off (Trini). Most of the year, I toe the line between the two.

But when it comes to Christmas, I am firmly Trini. Because we just do Christmas better than everyone else. And since most of you will probably never experience the singular joy of a Trini Christmas, today I’m going to give you a taste of what a Trini Christmas is like.

First off, a quick vocab lesson. For Trinis, it’s not “Christmas”, it “the Christmas” which is really “de Christmas”. As in, so and so is coming to visit for de Christmas. Or we’re “nicing up de Christmas”.  I don’t know why, but that’s just what you say. And to make things even more random, we don’t say New Year’s Eve in Trinidad, we say “Ole (old) Year’s Night”. Why? Nobody knows.

Trini Christmas is about food and music and family just like everyone else, but as we Trinis are wont to do, we took the food and music and made them way better than anyone else’s.  For Trinis, the soundtrack of Christmas is parang music.  It’s weird and kind of hard to describe but parang is basically Spanish-y sounding soca about Christmas-y stuffs. When you visit Trinis for de Christmas, this is what you hear ( loudly) and you can’t help but smile because it is absolutely the most random music ever. Here is one of favourite parang songs ever:

Now on to the food:

We bake bread and we bake bake

You can’t have Trini Christmas without homemade bread. You just can’t. And if you’ve never eaten bread made by the hands of a Trinidadian woman you are not living right. The shit is so good that I’ve been known to fight my family for the crusty end of the bread, which ordinarily you couldn’t pay me to eat.

As you can imagine, homemade bread is a hot commodity and it runs out with a quickness. And since it kind of takes a long time to make, the aunties can’t really keep up with the demand, so when the bread runs out we turn our attention to bake.  Now bake is nearly impossible to describe if you’ve never had it, so just think of it as a more intense version of bread. It’s the same basic concept but minus the yeast so it doesn’t rise as much and it’s much thicker and denser.

Take a look:

The thicker texture makes bake bettter prepared to hold up all the stuff we pile on top of it.  Which leads me to…

Swine? Yes.

It’s not Christmas morning if you don’t have Christmas ham for breakfast. And it’s not Christmas ham if it’s not studded with cloves.

You take a piece of homemade bread or a wedge of bake and you slap a slice of ham thick enough to clog your arteries on that bad boy and you’re good. If you also include a slice of “orange cheese” and spread some chow chow on it you will see God. Trust me.

And of course there is a parang about pork at Christmas:

The holy trinity

With all this dense food we eat at Christmas time we need good beverages to wash everything down. And at Christmas time we Trini’s worship the holy trinity of beverages: Pear Drax, Sorrel, and Puncha Crema.

Sidenote: Some Trinis will tell you the trinity is actually Mauby, Sorrel and Puncha Crema. They are right. But I hate mauby so I’ve redesigned the trinity to suit my purposes. What? It’s my blog.

Pear Drax is the greatest drink ever invented. Seriously. It’s basically pear-flavoured pop but it is so much better than that. Trinidad is the only place in the world where it’s brewed and that’s because Trinis are the only people smart enough to appreciate it. My cousins and I all get along amazingly well, but we will shank one another for the last glass of Pear Drax. That’s the truth.

Sorrel is a drink we make from some weird plant. I think it’s some kind of hibiscus or something. No matter. You boil it, do some other shit, and what you get is a big ole pitcher of bright red delicious. And yet another thing for Trini people to fight about. Because if you don’t have sorrel at Christmas, you lose.

And then there is puncha crema. You might hear this referred to as ponche de creme, but that is just uppity people from the north of Trinidad showing off. “Dung sout” where my people are from you call it puncha crema and you get shitfaced when you drink it. And a stomachache if you’re lactose. You basically mix together multiple cans of evaporated milk, about half as many cans of condensed milk, a dozen eggs, and a big ass bottle of Trini white rum. A couple of sips of that and you’ll be feeling “rell nice for de chrismas”.

As the immortal Lord Kitchener says, drink a rum and a puncha crema, it’s Christmas morning:

The dark side

There is one bad thing about Trini Christmas and that is pastelles. Little packets of meat with cornmeal wrapped around them and then cooked inside a banana leaf, these shits look really good:

but don’t you fall for it. These joints taste like hatred and disappointment with the texture of something someone else already chewed and then pressed back together on the plate. As we Trinis would say, oh geed. These shits are disgusting.

The dessert of champions

No Trini Christmas meal is complete without black cake. Don’t let its innocuous name or slightly unappetizing appearance fool you, this stuff gives life. From what I gather, it’s like the fruit cake that tv characters are always talking about at Christmas, except it’s moist and delicious and not something anyone would complain about.

And because Trinis are nothing if not extreme, some Trini women start soaking the “fruits” for their black cake up to a year before Christmas. It’s like a competition to see whose black cake will get your blood alcohol past the legal limit soon enough. Because drunkenness is the official pastime of Trini Christmas.

Of course there is a parang about it:

And that’s Trini Christmas for you. Random right? But so fun that it almost makes a grinch like me excited about the holidays. But what about you guys? Share your random holiday traditions in the comments. And here’s a special parang from me to you:

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