Waiting for Christmas

Christmas was my first ‘adult’ festival. Christmas, it appeared, was my own thing, something I discovered thanks to a new set of friends

As a kid, I loved Deepavali. (Who doesn’t?) When the lungs and stomach could take all the festival entailed. I liked Dussehra and the bommala koluvu, too, and the sundal. And Vinayaka Chaviti and the undrallu. I loved them all as a kid.

But Christmas was my first ‘adult’ festival. Christmas, it appeared, was my own thing, something I discovered thanks to a new set of friends. And something that discovered me in return. Christmas was what I could do because I wanted to — without being told by someone that it was tradition.

It would be easy to dismiss my partiality to Christmas as having to do with the wine (oh, yes, I had plenty), the music, the ‘forbidden’ (I use quotes because I had absolutely no restrictions regarding what I ate as a child) cuisine or, above all, the lovely girl I adored then. And that would be partially true.

I also liked it perhaps because, thanks to my reading and movie-watching tastes, I so loved all things ‘Western’. And that would, no doubt, have been a factor, too.

But it was a little more than that, I suspect.

It had to do with how Madras felt in December. Especially at night. It had to do with the cool sweater you had to put on to stay warm, because you’d be on someone’s terrace or off on a bike to church to attend mass. It had to do with how it proved to me that I was likeable enough to be embraced by a new set of people, supposedly different from me, and included in their festivities like I was their own.

It had to do with the singing. And the dancing.