Guadeloupe Islands blog

Nancy Lyon was marked for adventure at 13 when her mother, a bored Indianapolis housewife, took the family station wagon and her four daughters off to Acapulco for the summer with no man, no plan, and no Spanish. Nancy has tried to top that rollicking rite of passage with travels from Tunisia to Malaysia, Ireland to Australia, a 1970 VW Westphalia “Dame Gitane” and various lives in Manhattan, San Francisco, Switzerland, Dublin, and now Montreal, Quebec. Her stories and photos have appeared in GEO, New York Magazine, Ms., The New York Times, Travel & Leisure, The Saturday Review, the Chicago Herald Tribune, the Miami Herald, In Dublin Magazine, the Montreal Gazette, and US alternative newsweeklies.

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’s 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.

While all of North America is rushing to the malls, the people 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.

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