Indian Christmas- Essays, Memories, Hymns

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I remember my surprise when I saw my first live Santa Claus. He was a figure in red that Akbarally's, Bombay's first department store, wheeled out around Christmas week. He was a thin man, not very convincingly padded, and he was in some kind of toy car which he pedalled frantically around the store, waving at bemused children and adults. He was nothing at all like the rotund Santa of glossy greeting cards and storybooks. But within a few minutes I had warmed to him, laughing at his cheerful 'Ho-Ho-Hos', and then laughing with him. He seemed to be from my part of the world, someone who would climb up our narrow Mahim stairs and leave something at the door for us at three or four a.m., then take the local back to his regular job as a postman or seller of second-hand comics. The man in the cards and storybooks preferred London and New York. And a lot of snow.

There wasn't much snow in Bombay, except when someone from the family pulled out an old record of Jim Reeves singing 'White Christmas' and we all listened respectfully because 'those old singers were the best, what voices-you can understand what they're saying, not like this modern noise. (Where do old songs from the US go to die? They go to Goan Roman Catholic homes and parties.) But since we had seen snow on the Christmas cards that came from cousins abroad, we dutifully unrolled balls of cotton wool and decorated inoffensive young casuarinas, dressing them up as pine trees.

Christmas was about Jesus, yes, and about the Nativity, yes, but it was also about food. Everyone had a family member who had soaked the raisins in the rum when October came around and sent it all to be baked at the Irani down the road which did the honours lovingly. Everyone had a friend who made marzipan with peeled almonds, or who made marzipan with the skins and this was debated every year. Everyone also knew that when the sweets came out, you had to pounce on the good stuff-the milk creams and the slices of that cake with the luscious raisins-or you'd be stuck with the rose cookies and the neoris, which were just plate-fillers.

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