Beyond Christmas: The Main Street spectacle
If the ‘lighting up,’ the product display, and the various other attractions trotted out to ensure that this year’s Main Street Christmas Village offered a ‘lift’ of spirits from the emotional trough associated with the coronavirus pandemic, it appears to have worked. It did other things too. It made the point that almost two years into the pandemic, Guyanese have not lost the art of embracing Christmas, never mind the fact that they have had to endure an all-year rash of restrictions that derailed their accustomed way of existence and in many instances, sent some of us into deep depression.
It was always likely that once the event was given the ‘go ahead’ by the powers that be, the turnout would be huge and the collective ‘feel good’ would be intense to the point of being tangible.
Prior to the onset of the festive season, less than subtle messages were being sent by sections of the populace that people can only take so much… so that while the reports about the global impact of the pandemic, including the more recent visitation by the Omicron strain continued to provoke periodic attacks of jitters in the decision-making posture of the administration, a sizeable portion of the urban population had made up their minds this Christmas and they would not be denied.
On Main Street, on the opening night of the Christmas Village, people, while not appearing to be unmindful of the risk, were behaving in a manner as if to suggest that being there was worth the chance which many would have felt they had taken.
The vendor turnout at the event told some interesting stories, the best ones, perhaps, being those that provided uplifting evidence of survival by myriad micro and small businesses across the sectors mostly through the stamina and single-mindedness of their owners. Remarkably, some of them had actually been created at the
height of the pandemic.
What was patently evident, too, was that the pandemic had done nothing to sate the appetite of Guyanese for the culinary offerings, beverages, food seasonings, craft, and cosmetics offered by the vendors. On Main Street during those decidedly uplifting evenings, there was manifest evidence that those appetites and aptitudes had remained undiminished.
Patronage, from what we were being told by the vendors, appeared to have been triggered by a kind of ‘break free’ spirit, another indication that this being Christmas, people appeared to have made up their minds to ‘face down’ the pandemic.
If the risks were clearly reflected in the official cautions, the environment on Main Street bared unmistakable signs of people having drawn a proverbial line in the sand. They weren’t going to back away any further.
What the Christmas Village also did as much as anything else was to remind how indifferent the powers that be have been, over the years, in pursuing the creation of an enabling environment in which micro and small businesses - particularly in the creative sectors - can thrive. Quite a few political administrations ago, operatives in the creative sector had reportedly been allocated premises in the capital where they could display and market their creations. That initiative never bore fruit. The
Christmas Village’s compelling demonstration of both creativity and entrepreneurship ought surely to have shamed the powers that be into providing creative people in the craft and culinary sectors, among others, with far more resources than are at their disposal at this time. At the Christmas Village the vendors sent a powerful message that the authorities simply ‘ain’t ready’ insofar as creating conditions under which increasing numbers of talented and entrepreneurially bent Guyanese can thrive. Meanwhile, people are doing what they can with the talents and resources that they possess to take their lives and their livelihoods into their own hands.
The manifestations of occurrences like the Main Street Christmas Village are possessed of a significance that goes far beyond the outpouring of ‘feel good’ by the thousands of people who turned up ‘for the party.’ It reflected an outpouring of creativity that remains deficient in official support.
Perhaps, more pointedly, the Main Street Christmas Village provided a poignant reminder that the largely women-driven determination that the prevailing pandemic not break the spirit of the intrepid emerging Guyanese entrepreneur is alive and well. Here, the portents for upliftment are as encouraging as those that repose in the far more widely paraded prospects that derive from those millions of barrels that we ceaselessly celebrate.