September is a favorite time of year for a lot of Belizeans, and the weather is part of why. The summer heat is turning. Storms roll in during the morning and clear off by ten, and the rest of the day belongs to whatever the town has planned.
Belizeans call the whole thing the September Celebrations. Not Independence Day, not St. George’s Caye Day. The September Celebrations, plural, because it is a season and not a date.
Cochinita pibil, poc chuc, and escabeche all start with red recado. A prepared achiote paste dissolves into sour orange in minutes instead of the hour it takes to grind annatto, oregano, and clove from seed.
Full-fat coconut milk with nothing added - the choice for recipes where fat carries flavor and texture matters, from soups to baking.
School children march. Not a few schools in the capital, but towns, villages and cities alike, children marching through the streets with their own school. This is the most patriotic stretch of the Belizean year and nobody is shy about it. Belizeans are proud to be independent and September is when they say so out loud.
There are flags everywhere, and flag shirts, and flag hats, and whatever else the vendors have printed that year.
What Are the September Celebrations?
Two national holidays inside one month, plus everything the country stacks around them.
- September 10, St. George’s Caye Day. Commemorates a battle fought off the coast in 1798.
- September 21, Independence Day. Belize became independent from Britain in 1981.
Both are public and bank holidays. Between them the calendar fills with carnival road marches, pageants, ceremonies, heritage tours, sporting events and street parties, organized nationally by the National Celebrations Commission and locally by every town council that wants a piece of it.
The food is not incidental to any of this. A parade route in Belize is also a food route.
What a Belize September Parade Is Actually Like
Most of the marching happens during the school day, and the children march in uniform. That matters more than it sounds like it should. It makes the parade a school event as much as a national one, and there is real school pride riding on it. The whole school turns out, organized by age group, the small ones first.
They practice for it. Not everybody just walks. Some children rehearse a dance and perform it along the route. My sister was one of them, dressed up, with a routine she had been working on for weeks.
Marching bands play, and there are more of them now than there used to be. That part has grown over the years. There is also a September playlist, more or less standard and completely inescapable, that you will hear from every sound system in the country for a month.
And the community comes out, not just the parents. People line the route to watch children they know march past in uniform. The official ceremony is the formal half of the day, but this is the half people actually turn out for.
September 10: St. George’s Caye Day
The battle ran from September 3 to September 10, 1798, off the coast of what is now Belize City. On one side, Spanish forces under Arturo O’Neill, pressing Spain’s claim to the territory. On the other, the resident woodcutters known as the Baymen, fighting alongside enslaved Africans. The Spanish were in full retreat by September 13 (source).
On the hundredth anniversary the colonial government made September 9 and 10 a holiday (source). Today it is September 10, and it is marked with an official ceremony and a Citizens Parade through the principal streets (source).
Here is the part that usually gets left out. A large share of that force was enslaved Africans, and scholarship has noted that their origins and their status have historically received less attention than the versions of the story that cast them simply as ancestors of Belizean Creoles (source). Every Belizean schoolchild learns September 10. Not every version of it says who was holding the line.
I include that because a national holiday can carry the truth. It does not need the tidy version.
September 21: Independence Day
Belize became independent on September 21, 1981. The flag went up for the first time as the flag of a country and not a colony. That is inside living memory for a lot of Belizeans, which is part of why the day still has force to it.
September 21 is the bigger of the two days in most of the country now. The official ceremony, the parade, the fireworks, the family cooking. If you only get one day in Belize in September, this is the one.
The parades run the length of the country and they are what leads into the rest of it. The largest is in Belize City. In the larger towns there is almost always a fireworks show late at night on Independence Day, which is why the eating starts early and goes long. You are not cooking a meal. You are keeping a house fed from the morning parade through to the fireworks.
Belize at 45: the 2026 Calendar
2026 is the 45th anniversary of independence. The National Celebrations Commission set the theme as “Look at Me. I Am Belize @45” (source).
- Saturday, September 5: Carnival Road March, Belize City
- Thursday, September 10: St. George’s Caye Day
- Saturday, September 19: National Service Day
- Monday, September 21: Independence Day, and a second Carnival Road March in Orange Walk
Also on the national calendar without published dates: two weeks of heritage tours running through San Ignacio, Benque Viejo, Belmopan, Belize City, Orange Walk and Corozal, plus Bram, a uniform parade, Pan Yaad, and the Belize at 45 Creative and Cultural Excellence Awards (source).
Town councils publish their own schedules and they publish them late. If you are traveling for a specific event, check the council for that town in the week before, not a month before.
What Do Belizeans Eat for the September Celebrations?
There is no single September menu the way there is a single Christmas menu. What there is instead is the food that shows up whenever Belizeans cook for a crowd, and September is the longest run of cooking for a crowd in the year.
Rice and Beans with Stew Chicken
If a Belizean is cooking for twenty people, this is what they are cooking. Rice and beans is red kidney beans and rice cooked together in coconut milk, and it is not the same dish as stewed beans served beside white rice. Belizeans will correct you on that. Over it goes stew chicken with red recado, which is the version most people mean, though the version without recado is a real Belizean dish and not a shortcut.
What the recipe will not tell you: dissolve the recado in a few tablespoons of warm broth before it goes into the pot. Drop the block in whole and it clumps, and you get dark streaks instead of color through the whole pan.
Potato Salad
Belizean potato salad goes next to the rice and beans, and it is closer to a bound salad than an American picnic one. It gets made the night before. It has to be, because the flavor needs the time and because on the day itself the stove is busy.
Barbecue
September is barbecue season in Belize, and barbecue here means a drum cut lengthwise, chicken quarters, and a wet recado marinade rather than a dry rub with sauce at the end. Recado BBQ chicken is the one. Fundraiser barbecues run all month, sold by the plate out of the yard of whoever is raising the money.
Escabeche
Escabeche is the northern contribution. Onion soup with chicken, vinegar and black pepper, a Corozal and Orange Walk dish before it was anybody else’s. It reheats, which is why it works for a house full of people arriving at different times.
Tamales and Dukunu
Both are corn, both are wrapped, both get made in quantity because the labor only makes sense in quantity. Tamales are the Mestizo side of the table. Dukunu is fresh corn wrapped in the corn husk itself, and it belongs to the Creole kitchen. September pulls both onto the same table, which is roughly the point of the month.
Garnaches, Salbutes and Panades
The fried masa family, and the food you will actually be eating if you are standing on a parade route. Garnaches are flat and topped with beans, cheese and cabbage. Salbutes puff. Panades are folded and filled, usually with fish. They are sold in threes, they are cheap, and the vendor who is good at them does not need a sign.
Fry Jacks
Fry jacks are breakfast, and during the September Celebrations breakfast happens early because the parade does. They also solve the problem of feeding a house full of people who slept over.
Boil Up, Sere and Hudut
Boil up is the Creole one pot, ground food and fish and eggs layered together. Sere and hudut are Garifuna, coconut and fish, and they carry the most weight in Dangriga and the south. None of these are September dishes specifically. They are what a Belizean family cooks when the family is all in one place, and in September the family is all in one place.
Something Cold
The morning storm clears by ten and then it is hot. Rum punch for the adults, tambran for everybody, and a cooler of ice that somebody has to keep refilling all day.
Cake
Black fruit cake is a Christmas cake that gets made for any occasion big enough to deserve it, and a 45th independence anniversary qualifies. Faster options that still read as celebration: rum cake, 7UP cake, or a tray of powder buns for the children.
Where the Celebrations Happen
All six districts do something. They do not do the same thing.
- Belize City: the biggest of everything. Carnival Road March, the Citizens Parade, the official ceremonies.
- Orange Walk: its own Carnival Road March, and in 2026 it lands on September 21 itself.
- Corozal: on the heritage tour circuit, and eight miles from the Mexican border, so the food skews Mestizo.
- Cayo: San Ignacio, Benque Viejo and Belmopan are all on the heritage tour route.
- Stann Creek: Dangriga, where the Garifuna presence in the celebrations is strongest.
- Toledo: Punta Gorda, the smallest crowds and the Maya south.
Is September 10 or September 21 the Bigger Holiday?
September 21 is bigger nationally. September 10 is older, and in Belize City it is not a distant second. The honest answer is that most Belizeans do not rank them. They treat the two dates as bookends on one season and celebrate the whole thing.
What Is Belize’s National Dish?
Rice and beans with stew chicken, potato salad and fried plantain. That is the September table, and it is the plate a Belizean will describe if you ask what Belizean food is. We go through it properly in the national dish of Belize.
Do Businesses Close for the September Celebrations?
September 10 and September 21 are both public and bank holidays, so banks and government offices close and many businesses do too. Restaurants and bars mostly stay open, because those are the two days everybody wants to be out. Buses run a holiday schedule, which is thinner and less predictable than the normal one.
Should You Visit Belize in September?
Yes, with the weather understood. September sits inside the Atlantic hurricane season, and the daily pattern is a storm in the morning that clears by ten. Plan around the morning, not around the whole day. It is also one of the cheapest months of the year to be in Belize and the only month you will see the country celebrating itself at full volume.
Book accommodation in whatever town you want to be in for the parade, and book it early. Belizeans travel home for September and the rooms in Belize City and Orange Walk go before the tourists get to them.
More on the country and the season: our Belize travel guide, the street food guide for what to eat on a parade route, and Easter in Belize for the other big food holiday.
Cook the September Table
You do not have to be in Belize to cook for September. The diaspora in Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago and New Jersey has been doing this for decades, and the whole menu above is on this site with the substitutions worked out for a US kitchen.
Start with rice and beans and stew chicken. Everything else on the table is a decision. Those two are the table. Browse the rest in Belizean Recipes A to Z.
Photographs of the parade and of the San Ignacio street by 65mb, licensed CC BY 2.0.
