‘Unwrapping Christmas: Caribbean Tradition, History, and Meaning.’

CHRISTMAS TODAY, deeply shapes our culture and is full of commercial influences, and while the Christian story of Jesus’ birth remains central to the day itself, for many, it’s also a time of festivity, Christmas Cards, giving gifts, family gatherings, week-long services and celebrations.

In the Caribbean community, unlike in the host society, there have traditionally been very few Christmas church services. The reasons for this are deep-rooted and historical. When Caribbean people first arrived in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, women—especially mothers and daughters—spent what little spare time they had after long working weeks cleaning, seasoning meats, cooking fish, and baking cakes and breads in preparation for Christmas Day. Most Caribbean people, including pastors, were employed full-time, which meant that organising church services during Christmas week was nearly impossible.

Christmas day itself, was largely a family-centred occasion, often celebrated at the home of the family patriarch. It usually began with an elaborate breakfast,-one that sets the tone for the rest of the festive season, and anyone familiar with the traditional Caribbean, especially Jamaican breakfast, multiply this two or three times, and you will grasp the scale of what was typically served on Christmas morning. With this focus on family and food, attending a Christmas Day church service was simply impractical. Also with services often held in rented halls, and with public transport shut down for the holiday, getting to church was nearly impossible. This set a pattern that persists to this day, and although Christmas remains deeply ingrained in Caribbean culture, relatively few Caribbean churches hold services on December 25th.

There are also theological reasons for this omission. Many Caribbean Christians come from a Pentecostal background, where religious holidays are not venerated in the same way as they are in established denominations. What Black Pentecostals generally believe, is that Jesus was born, died, and resurrected—and now lives daily in the hearts of believers. For them, the life of Christ is not confined to one special day, but is something to be lived and celebrated daily.

No one knows the exact date Jesus was born, and the day we now celebrate as Christmas—December 25th—was not recorded in any biblical or historical document, for in the ancient world, accurate records of births and deaths were either non-existent or were inconsistently kept.

What we do know about Jesus’s birth however, comes from the Gospel of Luke (Luke 2:4–19), and it wasn't until nearly 400 years later that Jesus' birth began to be celebrated on December 25th. The Roman Emperor Constantine who converted to Christianity around AD 312, is largely responsible for this. What he did, along with the  church leaders of his day, was to join the celebration of the birth of Christ, with existing pagan festivals—most notably Dies Natalis Solis Invicti (the birthday of the unconquered sun), and in a strategic partnership, helped to popularise December 25th as the official birthday of Christ, and Christmas.

Another, lesser-known explanation for choosing December 25th involves Sextus Julius Africanus (c. AD 160–c. 240), an early Black Christian historian born in what is now Libya. He calculated that Jesus was conceived on March 25th, a date later commemorated as the Feast of the Annunciation- when the  archangel Gabriel, declared that Mary  would conceive and bear a son, therefore becoming the mother of Jesus. Counting nine months from that conception date, places Jesus’ birth in December—on the 25th. While this theory influenced early Christian thought, it’s been largely downplayed by the Catholic Church.

In the Caribbean—especially in Jamaica—Christmas, apart from its religious traditions, contains a deep story rooted in history, and although it’s a time of joy, with music, family, carols and church services, it celebrates the season in two distinct secular ways.

The first is Junkanoo, where in Jamaica it takes the form of mask dancing, acting, street processions, and general revelry. It’s a tradition that dates back hundreds of years and is rooted in the memory of ‘John Cannu,’ who rose up and resisted slavery. He has since become a folk hero, and at its peak in the 18^th century during the one day the enslaved had off at Christmas, they celebrated Junkanoo, but as soon as the authorities realised the celebrations were being used to communicate their escape plans with their drumming and dancing, they banned it. Similarly, the same thing happened in Trinidad with Canboulay, where the enslaved did much the same with their dancing and  the exaggerated costumes they made, mocking their enslavers as a form of resistance. 

The second event linked to Christmas in Jamaica, is the ‘Baptist War’, also known as the ‘Christmas Rebellion’ ( 1831–32). Led by Sam Sharp a Baptist deacon and preacher, he is today immortalised with a statue and square named after him in Montego Bay on the North coast of Jamaica. No one knows what he looked like, as there are no drawing, photograph, paintings or etching of him. The portrait of him on the Jamaican 50 dollar bill, is an artist impression, which was commissioned by the government of Jamaica  in 1975.

The uprising that bears Sharp’s name, began on Christmas Day on the West Coast of Jamaica in 1831. Born in slavery in St. James Jamaica, sometime around 1801, sharp was converted to Christianity in the Baptist Church. Quickly he rose to become a Deacon and leader of the enslaved Christians in Montego Bay. Today his ‘rebellion’ is considered the largest enslaved uprising in the history of the British Empire, with over 60, 000 enslaved, taking part. It started as an initial strike for better wage and improved working and living conditions, but with years of pent up outrage and oppression, it turned violent.

What Sharp and his followers demanded was precisely what the missionaries had taught them and what Sharp himself had read — the simple message that all people are ‘one in Christ Jesus’ and that everyone, including the enslaved, was equal in His sight. Sharp and his followers determination was further fuelled by rumours circulating among the enslaved: stories brought by sailors who worked on the trading ships and overheard in conversations in the ‘Big House, that the King of England had declared an end to slavery and granted ‘freedom papers’, but that the colonial administration and plantation owners in Jamaica were suppressing the decree.

Sharp’s uprising lasted from December 25 1831 to 14 January 1832, and was brutally suppressed and put down by the soldiers and gun boats the administration deployed. Fourteen planters were killed along with over 200 enslaved people, and in retaliation the government executed over 3000 enslaves, hanging them by decapitating and cutting off their heads, placing them on poles around the Plantations, as a warning to anyone, contemplating any similar rebellion.

Sam Sharpe was ultimately betrayed by the Maroons—people who had themselves fought against the colonial administration for over seventy years, before reaching an agreement that secured their autonomy in exchange for returning runaway enslaves. On May 23, 1832, as he was led to the gallows, Sharpe is reported to have declared: ‘I would rather die on yonder gallows than live in slavery.’

What are we to make of Sam Sharpe’s rebellion? Quite a lot really, for although it is often reduced to a mere footnote in the history of emancipation and the abolition movement, Sharpe’s rebellion was central to both. His uprising sent shock waves throughout the British Empire and in Britain itself, galvanising the abolitionist movement at a critical moment.It also coincided with a number of powerful forces coming together. First it helped to weaken the powerful West Indian interest in the British Parliament, with the rise of the industrial class. It also clearly showed what was possible with that growing realisation that sugar production had become increasingly uneconomic. Also, falling prices—driven by competition from Brazil and Cuba—along with the depletion of the soil, meant that, as Eric Williams would later argue in Capitalism and Slavery, ‘slavery and plantation had become uneconomic,’ with Britain earning less from sugar than it was investing in it.

Sharpe’s rebellion also exposed that plantation owners in Jamaica and the wider West Indies, many of whom were absentee landlords, had very little emotional attachment to the area, unlike plantation owners in America. Their sole interest was the profit they could earn, and therefore what the uprising showed was what the future might hold, if there weren’t changes in the region. It prompted many planters to negotiate with the government for a compensation (reparation?) in exchange for agreeing to abolition.

It all came together in December 1832, when a bill to abolish slavery was introduced in Parliament and received royal assent. The ‘free paper’ that Sharpe and his followers, long awaited for, had finally arrived in Jamaica, bringing freedom to the 300,000 enslaved people of the island and all enslaved throughout the British Empire.

And so, as we settle into the joy of Christmas Day, whether in Britain or the Caribbean, we remember the history, traditions, and faith that have guided our celebrations. With gratitude for the sacrifices made before us, we raise a cheer to the day.