A Créole Christmas
By Nancy Lyon
I’d promised myself an I-hate-Christmas getaway to a hot tropical island. No gaudy shopping malls. No merry muzak. No hysterical spending matches. No sad rehashings of Dysfunctional Christmas Pasts. But what is this? Am I discovering that I actually like the holiday? At least the way they do it in Créole, in the French West Indies on Guadeloupe, one of the few Caribbean isles under-trammeled by tourists.
Singing Christmas Carols—Chanté Noels—in Guadeloupe
While all of North America is rushing to the malls to shop and celebrate Christmas, the islanders of Guadeloupe are out singing. All over this lush, butterfly-shaped island south of the Tropic of Cancer, where Christmas is as humble as a string of colored lights in a palm-fringed village square, there are esctatic displays of communal faith in music and laughter.
On the steps of the old stone cathedral, in the cobbled village square of Basse-Terre, we’re slapping our thighs and singing Créole-flavoured Chanté Noels. A skinny brown Santa in droopy red flannel is serving paper cups of strong coconut punch, sweet as candy. The moon is milky and voluptuous. The air is hot and sultry, yet a tender innocence fills the island night.
Shoulder-to-shoulder, in straw hats and flowered dresses, T-shirts and blue jeans, we’re swaying to these old cantiques that began in France as ethereal Renaissance airs, and with plenty of rum and lusty Caribbean heat, burst into erotically-syncopated paens to Christmas even a pagan would love.
The feverish tropical rhythmns, the jivey island beat, the bongos and cheeping tree frogs, maracas, native gwo-kaz drums and guitars have us all, villagers and visitors, leaping off the cathedral steps to dance in the streets.
Is this Christmas? After singing for a few hours, catching the Créole words as best I can, I stumble up the cathedral steps of Notre-Dame du Mont Carmel to see the midnight mass. At 1:30 a.m. the old church is packed to the rafters for the annual Créche vivante pageant reenacting the manger scene in Bethlehem. The plain wooden pews fill with buxom grande-mères in straw hats and white gloves fluttering fans; little girls in frothy lace and white anklets with hair plaited into corn rows, and gawky teens in over-polished shoes.
All eyes are riveted on the set, a hanging white bedsheet, and the young shepherds, angels, kings and Mary and Joseph, whose costumes of madras plaids, satins and velvets gussied up with sequins, beads, feathers show off hundreds of hours of hand-stitching. The organ booms and a teenage Magi with a fake moustache and a tinfoil crown inches down the aisle, trailing a 20-foot long purple velvet train. For all the 25 minutes he takes to reach the creche, moving with stilted care not to trip on his costume, every eye is upon him.
A highly-spirited Christmas
How to spend a rum-hungover December 25th in Guadeloupe? Guadeloupe’s beaches are tempting confections of sugary white, pearly grey and volcanic black sands fringed with sensually arching coconut palms. Like beaches on the French Riviera (Guadeloupe is an overseas department of France) topless and nude bronzing are pretty usual. Stripping to the buff on a silvery beach had a certain appeal. But climbing a live volcano seemed a more perverse way to celebrate Christmas Day.
I had said to myself that I couldn’t leave Guadeloupe without climbing to the summit of its live volcano La Soufrière. The volcano is the magnificent centerpiece of Parc Nationale de la Guadeloupe—42,750 acres of rain forest and high altitude savannah. It’s a cathedral of blooming orchids and flamboyants, wild pineapples, tangling lianas and towering redwoods. It is also a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve and the habitat of the world’s largest insect—the ferocious-looking seven-inch long Dynastes Hercules beetle with diabolically-serrated choppers like hooked saws.
The park covers the central portion of Basse-Terre, the mountainous wing of this butterfly-shaped island. The 4,500 foot high volcano has been smoldering for 13,000 years. La Soufrière erupted disastrously in 1976, but local seismologists say its temper is predictable enough to render it safe for Sunday hikers. The area for miles around is planted with devices that monitor its seismic activity.
Steep spongy walls of spongy sphagnum moss rise on all sides of La Soufriére volcano, the magnificent centerpiece of Parc Nationale de la Guadeloupe
Carbet Falls is as Christopher Columbus described it in 1493—a jet of water falling from the heavens. I stretch on a rock and inhale the steam of the hot springs and the heady spray from the falls. My gaze follows the silvery ribbon of water as it sashays 400 feet down to the churning pool where island kids are splashing and singing more Chantés.
The Parc Archaéologique des Roches Gravés at Trois-Rivières is only 12 miles away. I spend the rest of the afternoon exploring the forest and the eerie tumble of giant volcanic boulders overrun with Strangler Figs—called Evil Figs—in my search for Arawak petroglyphs.
Without a guide, it’s a real treasure hunt trying to find these symbols carved in 300-400 A.D. by the first inhabitants of the Antilles, subsequently decimated by the violent Caribe tribes who followed them.
In the days that remain of my getaway, I zip around Grande-Terre, the flat wing of this butterfly-shaped island, getting happily lost on back roads and exploring Créole fishing villages. I browse for handcrafts at the market in Sainte-Anne, gawk at exotic root vegetables at the market in Pointe-à-Pitre, sample tazard and other fresh seafood in Saint- François, and drive to the rocky présque-ile of Pointe des Chateaux, to catch a last fabulous sunset. Wherever I am, I can’t shake the catchy melodies, spicy syncop and sweet lyrics of these Chantés Noels. Al-le-luia! Kirie elie son!
Carbet Falls on Guadeloupe 400 feet of silvery ribbon
