Ghosts of Christmas past

Call it the market, call it the Hallmark effect, but there's no denying that every year around this time something gets into the air. No amount of cynicism--or realism--has been able to take away that sense of specialness brought on by images of snow-laden fir trees and green-and-red ribbons and gingerbread and rich plum cake. No matter that I live in a climate where there is neither snow nor fir tree and nicely laced eggnog is hard to come by. And no matter what my postcolonial consciousness knows about the constructed nature of history and the mediated nature of contemporary culture.

Come December, the strains of The Nutcracker and Jim Reeves' Christmas carols courtesy YouTube mingle in my home with the evening telecasts of the Marghazhi kutcheris from Chennai. It's been a few years since we pulled down our little artificial tree and the handmade ornaments made when the kids were in preschool and kindergarten, sit with it in the loft, packed away in tissue paper, along with so many memories. It's been only a couple of years since I last baked sugar cookies in the shapes of the season--a recently discovered gluten intolerance lowered the motivation somewhat.

But spooling backwards. Last year, my daughter and I were with my brother's family and spent Christmas Eve in New York City, doing the tourist circuit, beginning with lunch at the Ellen's Stardust Diner to watching the skaters at Rockefeller Center past the dressed-up Macy's windows to the winter market at Bryant Park, complete with hot chocolate and roasted chestnuts. We drank the feel-good kool-aid and smiled along with everyone else, enjoying the warm cosy feeling and ignoring the little voice that said this was not forever. A few days before, we had watched Langston Hughes' Nativity play in a traditional black theatre in downtown Boston and sung along with a jubilant chorus. And that morning, we helped pack cookies and cupcakes for a holiday fundraiser for a healthcare charity.

It's the lights and the music and the cold. And even without the cold, the memory of lights (and of course, the pictures on social media) and the presence of music brings back the spirit. Listening to the simple sounds of the Little Drummer Boy (listen to this lovely version by Pentatonix) or Silent Night also reminds me that it's not all commerce, there is a magic that we need to believe in, something that has little to do with religion and everything to do with faith--in people and the possibility of goodness.

The end of the year is as much about nostalgia as it is about hope. But as I get older, it seems more and more about remembering rather than doing. I scour old photo albums for pictures of winters past and smile at the smiles recorded in those frames.

When the children were little, we bought into the excitement of Christmas morning with gifts ferreted away that magically appeared on the day, even going so far as to hide outside the window jingling what were supposed to be sleigh bells! The anticipation and the delight on the children's faces were well worth the subterfuge and the pretence.

Another precious Christmas memory relates to Achala's elementary school, which had a lovely tradition of having all the children write a story, and two children from each grade were selected to go choose the school tree and read their stories on the bus ride to the tree farm. When in the second grade, Achala's story was selected and what a joy it was to ride the bus with the kids and listen to their varied tales!

But Christmas also brings with it, for me, a sense of "awayness". I first encountered the festive season in all its "winterness" when I was a child in cold, cold, Canada, and then again as a young adult and again as an older adult, each time away from home. There was always the sense of being an outsider looking in, of trying to make one's own something that was essentially foreign--of standing in the driveway of a suburban home looking into a window where a Norman Rockwell family sat unpacking presents around a decorated tree. One is always trying to recreate that warm feeling in its fireside framing, a sense of perfection that is as foreign as those snowy winters. To think of it, once the market appropriates a holiday, it sells us images that make the experience completely unattainable--and in the process, takes away the possibility of perfection that resides in our own spaces, framed in our own colours.

Yet, yet. In Hyderabad, Christmas too--like Deepawali, or Navaratri, or Pongal--brings with it certain traditions that I have come to cherish. The mingling of Tchaikovsky and Thyagaraja in my domestic soundscape. The city's own Festival Choristers and their offering of holiday songs. My friend Sarika's at-home on Christmas day. The rich plum cake, soaked in rum, from Secunderabad Club and rose cookies from Karachi Bakery. And when I can rouse myself from my inertia, buttery sugar cookies from my own kitchen.