{"id":3705,"date":"2020-12-24T11:30:15","date_gmt":"2020-12-24T11:30:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=143096"},"modified":"2020-12-24T11:30:15","modified_gmt":"2020-12-24T11:30:15","slug":"forget-white-christmas-caribbean-carols-are-dark-and-stormy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2020\/12\/24\/forget-white-christmas-caribbean-carols-are-dark-and-stormy\/","title":{"rendered":"Forget \u2018White Christmas\u2019: Caribbean carols are dark and stormy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The holidays in New York City can be pretty magical, if you don\u2019t mind the cold. The main avenues all over the city, including two near where I live, are decorated with lights and tinsel to commemorate the season. There\u2019s even a local <a href=\"https:\/\/www.qchron.com\/editions\/central\/cruising-for-a-cause-santa-brings-the-joy\/article_2146802c-6070-5710-835c-6988be686fe2.html\">Santa<\/a> in the Ridgewood Glendale area who drives around in a decked-out convertible blasting \u201cO Christmas Tree\u201d and \u201cJingle Bell Rock.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>American holiday music is a lot of fun, filled with bells and \u201ctra-la-las.\u201d \u201cDeck the Halls&#8221; will always be one of the best holiday bops of all time. But nothing hits me in the holiday feels like the Caribbean music that my parents would play for me and my siblings around this time of year. Just like some English radio stations would start blaring \u201cJingle Bells&#8221; every hour on the hour, stations like 97.9 La Mega would play Christmas merengues alongside holiday remixes and more traditional medleys. I have memories of Christmas celebrations where my dad would find his wooden g\u00fciro, my aunt would take out a guitar, and I\u2019d sit nearby shaking maracas to some of those songs.<\/p>\n<p>American holiday songs tend to fall into a few categories: love songs like \u201cLast Christmas\u201d by WHAM, holiday decoration\u2013themed tunes like \u201cSilver Bells,\u201d and of course, religious carols about Jesus\u2019 birth. The holiday music my parents listen to falls into some of those same categories, but with a distinctly Caribbean\/Latin American flair. There are songs about having too many relatives, ones about drinking too much rum, and even medleys that mention death and demons. And some songs are about the weather \u2014 not about quiet, beautiful snow, but about relentless floods and roaring hurricanes.<\/p>\n<p>\n<iframe title=\"trulla express - parranda navide\u00f1a\" width=\"580\" height=\"435\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/jJAPPPWIfLY?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/p>\n<p>The medleys I listened to growing up often included a song, \u201cYo Me Tomo El Ron,\u201d about torrential rain in Bayamon, a municipality in Puerto Rico. The rhyme-filled song is kind of a big joke \u2014 it\u2019s about how it rains so much that the clothing hung outside won\u2019t dry and the nearby rivers are always swelling. It\u2019s also technically about rum and beer, which is to be expected for this genre.<\/p>\n<p>\u201c<em>Yo me tomo el ron, la cerveza fr\u00eda, porque en Bayam\u00f3n, mon, llueve to\u00b4 los d\u00edas<\/em>,\u201d the lyrics go. \u201cI drink rum, and cold beer, because in Bayam\u00f3n, mon, it rains every day.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The song reminds me of a few months I spent with family in the Caribbean as a preteen during the rainy season, which spans most of the summer and fall. It poured every day, and sometimes twice a day, in my mom\u2019s hometown in the Dominican Republic. And the song was right: Some of the streets looked like small streams, and my clothes never dried.<\/p>\n<p>\n<iframe title=\"Chuito El De Bayamon Con Johnny El Bravo - Yo Me Tomo El Ron\" width=\"580\" height=\"326\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/xqRFMHNhks8?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/p>\n<p>The song \u201cTemporal,\u201d which is in some of the holiday medleys, describes what it\u2019s like for a town to prepare for an incoming hurricane. (<em>Temporal<\/em> means seasonal, but also refers to the hurricane season, which lasts from June to early December.) It mentions a dark ominous sky and laments the crops that will be lost once the storm hits. The song also describes how the people of the town have gathered together in a secure place, full of anxiety as they wait out the storm.<\/p>\n<p>\u201c<em>Todo anuncia la tormenta, todo es ansiedad, el instinto va avisando, viene un temporal<\/em>,\u201d the song says. \u201cEverything announces the storm, everything feels anxious, the instinct tells us that a storm is coming.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\n<iframe title=\"Tony Croatto &quot;Temporal&quot;\" width=\"580\" height=\"326\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/D0RTMtERLVY?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/p>\n<p>I started listening to the song again late this summer, when it became clear that the Atlantic was having an <a href=\"https:\/\/grist.org\/climate\/the-2020-hurricane-season-is-tearing-through-the-alphabet-at-lmnop-speed\/?utm_source=syndication&amp;utm_medium=rss&amp;utm_campaign=grist\">extremely active<\/a> hurricane season \u2014 in fact, this season broke <a href=\"https:\/\/grist.org\/climate\/atlantic-hurricane-record-29-storms-and-counting\/?utm_source=syndication&amp;utm_medium=rss&amp;utm_campaign=grist\">several records<\/a>. Over the years, I\u2019ve seen several mentions of it on social media when major hurricanes struck the Caribbean, especially after Hurricane Maria in 2017.<\/p>\n<p>I asked my mom why death and catastrophic weather show up so often in the holiday tunes my family loves. \u201cDeath happens, and hurricanes happen,\u201d she told me. \u201cYou could die at any time &#8212; even after Christmas, or even right before Christmas. So why not celebrate while remembering that everything ends?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>She doesn\u2019t see that as morbid, but as realistic: Deadly hurricanes are a fact of life in the Caribbean. My mom isn\u2019t afraid of storms or mortality, and she thinks talking and singing about them \u2014 yes, even during the holidays \u2014 is better then pretending that things are OK. Not everything is perfect during \u201cthe most wonderful time of year,\u201d especially during a global pandemic. The holidays are a time to joyfully sing along to the songs you grew up with, while recognizing that there are real problems to consider, both now and once the new year begins. The holiday music of my childhood taught me as much.<\/p>\n<p class=\"grist-story-credit\">This story was originally published by <a href=\"https:\/\/grist.org\/\">Grist<\/a> with the headline <a href=\"https:\/\/grist.org\/climate\/forget-white-christmas-caribbean-carols-are-dark-and-stormy\/\">Forget \u2018White Christmas\u2019: Caribbean carols are dark and stormy<\/a> on Dec 24, 2020.<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"syndicated-attribution\">This post was originally published on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/2020\/12\/24\/forget-white-christmas-caribbean-carols-are-dark-and-stormy\/\">Radio Free<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The holidays in New York City can be pretty magical, if you don\u2019t mind the cold. The main avenues all over the city, including two near where I\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":218,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[108,396,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3705"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/218"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3705"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3705\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3706,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3705\/revisions\/3706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}