Trinidad Carnival — Monday and Tuesday

If you have to explain Carnival to a kid in three minutes, this is how: it's the two days before Ash Wednesday, every year, in Port of Spain. The whole island stops working. Everyone — and I mean everyone — is on a road somewhere. There are steel pan bands. There are trucks pulling speakers the size of fridges, playing soca so loud you feel it in your sternum. People wear costumes called *mas* — feathers, beads, sequins, headdresses that take six months to make.

Carnival has roots in the French planter masquerades and the African resistance fêtes of the 1800s. After emancipation in 1834, Trinidadians of African descent took the streets and made the holiday their own — adding stick fighting, calypso, and the steel pan, the only acoustic instrument family invented in the 20th century.

For Trinidadians abroad, the diaspora carnivals — Toronto's Caribana, London's Notting Hill, New York's West Indian Day Parade — are how the home stays in the body. The music, the food, the people who only see each other once a year.

If your kid is small, you don't need to drop them in the middle of Tuesday night on Frederick Street. Start with the music. Put on Machel Montano. Show them a costume photo. Tell them the year their family went, or didn't, and why.