Nine Mornings festival ends this Sunday at Heritage Square

The year’s Nine Mornings celebrations come to an end on Sunday, December 24, with the announcement at Heritage Square of winners in the various categories of competition, such as best lighted village, and the song contest.

The Nine Mornings Festival was launched on Sunday December 3 at Heritage Square, signalling the official start of the Christmas Season in St Vincent and the Grenadines under the theme “Our Christmas, Our Vibes.”

In an effort to encourage patrons to turn out early for the activities, this year, for the first time, tickets are distributed each morning to the first 100 persons who turn up to the festival in Kingstown between 4 and 4:30 am. The tickets give patrons the chance to enter the Nine Mornings Wake and Wheel competition. Each morning nine lucky persons will be chosen to spin the wheel and each spin is a win.

Nine Mornings It is an annual unique Vincentian tradition, held in various communities from December 16 to 24, during which patrons engage in family-friendly activities and Christmas lighting. It is a tradition in which Vincentians, and now joined by visitors, for well over 100 years wake up in the wee hours of the morning for nine days before Christmas to engage in wholesome fun to be enjoyed by all ages, an activity carried out nowhere else in the world.

This unique Vincentian activity historically included a range of activities, among them sea baths, dances or called in in local parlance, fetes, bicycle riding, and street concerts, and steel-band jump-ups in the rural communities.

The origins of the Nine Morning Festival are unknown and remain clouded in some mystery, although the original tradition relates it to the ‘novena’ of the Catholic Church on the nine days before Christmas.

It is believed, although debatable, that after the early morning church services of the Catholics, worshippers began walking the streets while others went for sea baths. From this the popular Nine Mornings festivity emerged. Although popular opinion has this practice as starting during the period of slavery, it was more likely to have been a post-emancipation practice.