Merry Christmas!

I fell in love with Christmas when I was a kid. Sometimes I feel it appealed to me not just because of the excitement but also because it was mysterious. Technically, it wasn’t my festival. I am a Hindu. But I had seen a lot of Christmas in London, and I was too young for my mother to explain that God was divided. So she played along. For me, she had to bake a cake with snowy white icing, roast a chicken stuffed with onion, bake potatoes and boil vegetables and make some thick gravy too.

Meanwhile, I was more than ready a week before Christmas with my miniature plastic pine tree, little shiny balls and stars to hang on it and clean stockings to hang on Christmas Eve. And I begged my mother for the cotton which would be my fake snow. As I grew up my collection of decorations grew too, to my mother’s consternation. Satin ribbons, shiny wrapping paper, with which I even wrapped a few Alphabet blocks to put under the tree. 

And at night I would wait, for just a shuffle of clothing against the wall, a rustle of plastic wrappers or a jingle of a reindeer bell. But I never heard anything! I remember asking about how Santa would come to fill my stocking, since we didn’t have a chimney. The answer I got was that Santa had a magical golden key which could open any modern day door. The presents had to come, one way or another.

After I was old enough to understand who the real Santa was, my enthusiasm didn’t ebb. I just started thinking aloud what I wanted in my stocking, so that my parents could hear it. I didn’t always get what I wanted but every Christmas morning my heart surged happily when I saw the bulge in my stocking. 

The bells are jingling

Hail Christmas morning

There is magic in the air

And warmth in the winter frost !