Nine Mornings is a unique Vincentian festivity associated with the Christmas season. Nine Mornings before Christmas, Vincentians awake in the early hours of the morning and partake in a range of activities, among them sea baths, dances (or in local parlance, fetes), bicycle riding and street concerts. 

The origins of this festival are 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 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.

From the first firecracker on New Year’s morning to the last dance on Old Year’s night, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines celebrates the vitality of this young nation and honours a sacred past with a year-round programme of visitor-friendly festival events. Our diverse histories become alive in dance and drama, storytelling, sport and song. We learn we wonder, we fete.

As only a Caribbean people can, we do all these things in the mas' and magic of Carnival. In the many rural events and the midsummer splendor of Vincy Mas', Carnival celebrates a heritage of revelry, royalty and music. When steel pan orchestras play we hear the Caribbean’s unique music - not yet 100 years old.

The verses of our storytellers, the Calypsonians, reflect upon the soul of the nation today, our ills and dreams and aspirations, but from what history came their rhythm that’s Carnival’s heartbeat? Out of which past dance did the mischief making characters of old Mas'- the jab jabs, pierrots and jumbies, the boosey back, robbers and bats come? We dance to calypso’s beat in the raw energy of the new Soca music, which carries a flag-waving, jumping-up youth into a new Caribbean age, and we crown our own royalty-Soca Monarch, Calypso Monarch, Miss Carival, the Prince and Princess and the King and Queen of the Mas' Bands. As audience, or band member, we share the exhilaration and rapture of Mardi Gras when thousands of bejeweled masqueraders parade the street. We are all royalty for a day and we celebrate ourselves.