Christmas cheering

It’s been a long time since I shopped for Christmas decorations – somehow, ‘snow’ and everything associated with it that is so strongly linked with the season of Yule logs, mistletoe and Santa Claus seems a trifle incongruous in a city where the ethos tends to run on the lines of Ganpati Bappa Moriya, Bollywood and bhaji-pau. But the stores are all gung-ho to make sure that Christmas ranks up there with the much-reviled Valentine’s Day, Friendship Day and New Year’s Eve and more, all fairly alien concepts to the traditional Indian. Ever since I was a wee bairn I have been fascinated by the woolly white cotton drifts in display windows and was even taken to see Santa in a local department store – the only one the city had then – where I reportedly added to general family honour by taking one look at him and bursting into high-pitched wails of infant distress. Life abroad soon got me accustomed to Saint Nicholas, real snow (the cold fluffy deceptively light stuff), fireplaces with genuine wood fires, stockings hung up, decorated trees with piles of presents under it, sleigh rides and carol singing followed by lots of hot chocolate and strangely giggly grown-ups.

And then I found a different Christmas, one celebrated with equal fervour in my own home country. Stores started ‘Christmas Sale!’ events long before December began, Christmas cakes and puddings studded shelves in Monginis, Venus, Sassanian and other bakeries across town, while those that knew where to find the best lined up at the Taj Patisserie to order a treat – an order famously once forgotten, in my case, but made up for with familiar and endearing Taj-style grace and speed. We make ours at home, loaded with candied peel, spices and the depth and seduction of good brandy.

A couple of days ago, while grocery shopping, I found a huge selection of Christmas goodies at the supermarket near our house. There were the cakes, cookies, puddings and preserved fruit so familiar in shops in the UK or the USA, but also an array of decorations that enchanted as their variety and quantity stunned. There were rows and rows of vari-coloured tinsel, glittering and shimmering under the fluorescent lighting. There were trees – in vibrant (and rather unlikely) green, silver, gold and, hidden behind the towering giants, a small, shy red sapling. I saw strings of lights, from the tiny bulbs to the huge orbs so perfect for a large tree in a large house of a large family. And there were stockings and sleighs, reindeer and snowmen. Piles of rolls of brilliant gift wrap stacked one enormous shelf – most of it was the shiny plasticky stuff, but there were the less slick, more ethnic gift bags in handmade paper with gold printed paisleys, florals and abstracts that could look like a Christmas icon, if you squinted a little.

And then there were the Santas. Available at every traffic light and hawked by urchins who probably never knew the pleasures of that ageless moment when the fat man in a red suit slid down the chimney, they smiled fatly through fuzzy white beards, some seated in plastic sleighs pulled by plastic reindeer, some standing around holding loaded sacks and some grinning cheerily past red cheeks through a horde of clamouring children…no, that was at the store I went to yesterday, where Santa yelled Ho-ho-ho at me and everyone else who walked past and pulled out gaily wrapped presents from his overloaded bag. And everyone grinned back at the fat man who was the spirit of Christmas. For, you see, ’tis the season to be jolly!