Festive memories
The Hindu
To us, Christmas meant festive mood, many colours, gifts, greeting cards and noisy camaraderie
Memories go back in this season of festivities to the time when I was much younger and the world too was younger by several decades. To us, then Christmas meant a festive mood, many colours, gifts, greeting cards and noisy camaraderie. There was Santa grinning at us and twirling around on a scaffolding above our little heads at the crossing, with a massive grin and twinkling eyes. Shops and stores were festooned with balloons and decorated with trinkets and baubles, and silver and green paper of holly and mistletoe shouted out a welcome with discount sales and freebies. Come evening, restaurants and hotels would be blaring out to the enthusiastic clientele crowding around tables. Christmas cheer was everywhere.
The churches painted fresh wore garlands of lights spreading the Christmas spirit. There were carols, cakes and walnut-crusted chocolates in attractive packages to be spirited away. Christmas, the birth of the Christ child, was an event to be celebrated by our Christian friends with all of us who felt the festival and its fervour belonged to us. The message of Christmas with its love and peace enveloped us and we read Dickens’ A Christmas Carol with renewed joy and talked of Scrooge and the ghosts of Christmas, the Cratchit family and learnt love and humanity.
Christmas started for us before we closed for vacation. The nativity scene was enacted with the prettiest little girl standing in for Mary, in blue, looking the perfect Madonna and a tall girl for Joseph in a long brown robe and a beard threatening to fall off .The Star of the East shone above them in silver paper and the baby-sized doll of the Christ child lay in the crib in swaddling clothes. The three Wise Men stood looking very wise, in worshipful surrender and the beautiful hymn "Silent Night, Holy Night" practised for days was sung in fervent soulful voices and the sanctity of the moment was complete.