Each December, Liberia experiences a seasonal shift. Monrovia gets louder. Music spills into the streets. Clubs are packed, and events pile up. Members of the diaspora return in large numbers, and social media fills with images of nightlife, reunions, fashion, and celebration. December feels energetic, social, and alive, but it also becomes a moment of heightened attention, when Liberia is seen, shared, and discussed more than at any other time of the year. For many Liberians, especially those visiting for a short stay, this season becomes the dominant reference point for experiencing and understanding the country. It is the period through which impressions are formed and narratives are reinforced. But December is not how Liberia operates for the rest of the year. December offers a curated version of Liberia.

Most holiday activity in Montserrado County is concentrated in specific neighborhoods, venues, and social spaces—designed to make people feel and look good. These experiences are selective. Most major December events require paid entry, often through advance ticketing. That requirement alone shapes who can consistently participate. Attendance at these events tends to be dominated by diaspora Liberians, not because locals are absent, but because participation depends on disposable income that many people living in Liberia do not have. Visibility follows access, and access follows money.

This reflects a simple economic reality. Those returning from abroad often arrive with the time, mobility, and financial flexibility to move freely through social and economic spaces over a short period. For many locals, whose incomes are constrained by unemployment or underpaid informal work, the cumulative cost of participation makes sustained involvement difficult. As a result, the Liberia most visible during December is shaped by those who can afford the privilege of access. That privilege does more than determine who participates; it shapes how the country is experienced. The ability to move through Liberia with relative ease creates momentum, with one space opening onto another, allowing consumption to take precedence over evaluation.

Consumption here refers to spending power: the ability to purchase, absorb elevated prices, and acquire goods and services without pausing to calculate tradeoffs. When access enables this kind of consumption, attention shifts. A typical December evening unfolds around purchase and continuation, paying entry fees, buying drinks at inflated prices, moving through markets or venues shaped by seasonal demand, and engaging businesses that many locals cannot regularly afford. Disposable income allows these transactions to proceed without friction becoming consequential. As a result, consumption structures attention around continuity rather than evaluation. High costs and shortages do not register as signals of strain; they are absorbed. What might otherwise prompt reflection, price spikes, unreliable services, and uneven access is neutralized by the ability to keep spending. Structural conditions are encountered, but not interrogated, because disposable income allows life to continue uninterrupted.

This does not mean visitors are insulated from Liberia’s material realities; it means those realities are encountered through a different lens. Diaspora visitors do regularly encounter aspects of the constraints Liberians live with year-round. They drive on poorly maintained roads, navigate traffic congestion with little regulation, and adjust plans around failing infrastructure, particularly transportation, electricity, and essential services. Power outages interrupt routines, so generators and alternative power sources become necessary. Public services are unreliable, emergency responses are slow, hospitals and clinics operate with limited capacity, and internet or mobile connectivity fluctuates. These conditions are not hidden. What differs is how they are processed. These are ordinary conditions for many people living in Liberia, but for visitors, they are brief disruptions encountered between celebrations and leisure. When constraints are not lived continuously, their severity is difficult to internalize. These are simply conditions to tolerate for the time being before returning to more stable systems elsewhere.

That difference becomes clearer when contrasted with the systems many visitors return to after the holidays. For diaspora Liberians visiting Liberia, daily experience is shaped by comparison. The material conditions they are accustomed to elsewhere: stable electricity, reliable roads, predictable public services, and pricing that generally corresponds to service quality, function as baseline expectations rather than markers of personal success. These conditions are collectively maintained through public infrastructure, signaling national progress through consistency rather than exception. 

While visiting Liberia, those same conditions appear uneven and fragmented. Access to stability is often tied to personal resources, location, or social position, allowing those with greater means to move through a different version of the country than those without. This distinction shapes interpretation during the visit itself. In contexts where infrastructure functions predictably, individual achievement exists within a stable system and does not stand in for it. Over time, this framing allows individual success to stand in for national improvement, obscuring whether the systems meant to support everyone are functioning at all. In Liberia, however, stability often appears uneven and fragmented. Access to reliability is tied to personal resources, location, or social position, allowing those with greater means to move through a different version of the country than those without. Over time, this contrast allows individual access to be misread as collective improvement, obscuring whether shared systems are functioning at all.

The same pattern extends beyond social life into the economy itself. During December, optics dominate. Diaspora returnees arrive with the intention to spend, and that spending becomes highly visible. Businesses see increased cash flow, markets are busier, ports are more active, and services appear in constant motion. Informal economies, market women, roadside sellers, and small service providers feel the surge immediately as disposable income circulates more freely. At the same time, the formal sectors respond with increased imports, higher trade volume, and intensified activity around shipping and logistics. Together, this seasonal liquidity can create the impression of an economy in motion. Yet this impression is shaped by timing rather than structure. When vitality concentrates within a single month driven largely by external inflows, it exposes how fragile conditions remain throughout the rest of the year. An economy oriented around December spending cannot be measured by its peak moments; its weakness is revealed in the months when that influx disappears. 

If December is to mean more than celebration, it must become a moment of conscious connection, one grounded in awareness rather than spectacle. This begins by refusing to confuse individual access with collective improvement and by treating what is visible during the holidays as a partial window rather than a verdict on the country. It requires expanding engagement beyond curated spaces and seasonal movement, listening to those whose lives are shaped by these conditions year-round, and being honest about what is amplified and shared. Solidarity, in this sense, is not symbolic presence but sustained seriousness: the insistence that progress be measured by shared reliability rather than selective comfort. December can remain joyful, but it must also be truthful.

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