1. No responsibilities. Christmas is largely about turning up and having a good time (no organising bhog for 173 people, raising chanda from the neighbourhood or negotiating pandal-hoppers at 4am). This is finally one festival when most people can completely enjoy themselves without ‘baggage’.
2. DNA. We grew up to parents trying to be like the British remotely when it came to celebrating their most important festival: by sending telegrams coded “Compliments of the season”, then some years later taking the family for a walk through a Christmassy Park Street, then with moderate affluence possessing the cash and confidence to enter a restaurant, then with increased entrepreneurial capability to organising a home get-together (“Please bring your favourite sweet dish”) to eventually funding full-fledged Christmas dinners and evolving into a Secret Santa. Christmas is not in our calendar; it is in our mitochondria.
Christmas on Park Street
TT archives3. Weather. Kolkata is not as cold as Delhi and not as warm as Chennai. The result: Christmas is not a festival; it is a state of being. It is not even a state of being; it is a state of suspended happiness when everyone is smiling, neighbours in the elevator (who otherwise avoid eye contact) now utter two words (“Merry Christmas”) that gets the frostiness to trickle. If there were 10 Christmases in a day-wise sequence, they might have emerged from the elevator with a “Hail fellow, well met!” body language.
4. Sunlight. The most under-rated Christmas spirit driver. If it were cold and bleak, there would be a Christmas alright but no spirit; December 25 brings with its merriness, sunshine softness and a slanting December sun. Holly Golightly’s memorable line is “I am at Tiffany’s, nothing bad can happen to me here”. Replace the store with ‘Kolkata’.
December 25 brings with its merriness, sunshine softness and a slanting December sun
Shutterstock5. Sunset. I can’t imagine a memorable Christmas if the sun went down at 6.24pm and parents insisted that “Shaabdhaanay jaabi kintu, get home by 7.30!” Kolkata gets the longest party time across all Metros, starting as early as 4.55pm, making these three possible in a single evening — coffee at 5.15, Park Street walk at 7 and restaurant dinner at 8.30. People who do specifically nothing, return home and flop on the bed saying “Ki mojaa!”
6. Stories. Christmas is about stories of an infant, stable, stars and three wise men. There is much to be built on for those with an ear for religious romance and emotion. Or those without.
Stories of Christmas
Shutterstock7. Sounds. Christmas is a lot about sounds — the Engelbert coming out of a Bow Barracks ground-floor stereo system, the Silent Night wafting through St. Paul’s Cathedral at 11.55pm, Kamran belting out Last Christmas at the Tolly Christmas Lunch or street urchins running behind Santa’s buggy shouting “Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way…”
8. Food. Christmas has institutionalised the lunch. The menu at the Tolly Club has remained boringly unchanged, the songs are the same, the red-white shamiana setting has been unchanged for decades and even the place where I sit during that lunch is fixtured. I don’t do much except look dreamily into the distance or say a hi to someone I last met 13 years ago but there is no way I would do anything different. In an increasingly brazen world, the Christmas lunch is one of the last innocences to protect.
Christmas has institutionalised the day's lunch
Shutterstock9. Motifs. Christmas is a merchandised festival — the Santa Claus, red Santa cap, Christmas tree, mistletoe, bell, reindeer, sleigh and surprise gift. Curiously, this has remained a Jesus-agnostic festival (no Jesus pictures being marketed as merchandise or being visibly displayed), which leaves adequate room for non-believers to associate without feeling theologically threatened.
10. Birth. Christmas is associated with one of the gentlest (masoom) dimensions of human existence — the birth of a child. The birth can be diversely interpreted — the purity of the human spirit, the arrival of the Messiah and the harbinger of hope — based on one’s spiritual affiliation. This visual imagery of birth is one of night-time peacefulness marked by moderated light and sound, quite opposite to a neon world that we live through the rest of the year.
The birth can be diversely interpreted — the purity of the human spirit, the arrival of the Messiah and the harbinger of hope — based on one’s spiritual affiliation
Shutterstock11. Openness. Half the attendees at midnight mass across the city’s churches are non-Christians. The same Kolkatan is alternatively (or concurrently) Christian, Muslim and Hindu based on the external stimuli. The Christian clergy has been consistently welcoming: a non-Christian kneeling in a church is not unusual; a Muslim Loreto House alumni commented un-self-consciously that she spent most of her praying hours at St. Thomas’ Church next door.
12. Children. Most families are fuller than at other times of the year, their family members returning for their annual vacation. The happiness peaks during Christmas, when the sunlight is diffused, blankets and sweaters make it snug, addas stretch into the early morning, families step out of bed at 10.15 and the most important question being negotiated over a late breakfast is “What do I wear for lunch?”
Children – another joy of Christmas
TT archives13. Giving. If there were a synonym for Christmas, it would be ‘sharing’. Those without a philanthropic tissue in their body hand out sweets at traffic corners to eunuchs demanding cash; those working as boring accountants metamorphose into Secret Santas; retired teachers draw alponas outside the homes of strangers and leave before doors are opened.
14. Wear. There is no festival that makes it possible to wear leather jackets, knee-high boots, berets and Bobbi Brown with ease. If Christmas was June 25, an entire industry’s sales would have collapsed, companies would have reported lower third-quarter earnings, market valuations would have been weaker and we would all have been poorer — by moods, money and mindsets.
