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.
The day was spent in the school chapel as we knelt on its mahogany pews polished to a shine, with reverence, the stained glass windows letting in suffused light that felt mystic. Statues of the Virgin and Jesus looked down on us with benevolence as the long vases in front of them full with strands of lilies and bunches of roses. Christmas reminds me too of the Lord’s Prayer, "Our Father who art in heaven....", which we recited mindlessly every day in school. Later, when I studied the Bible as a literary text, I learnt that the prayer was the most perfect poem in the English language. H.L. Mencken says the King James Bible is probably the "most beautiful piece of writing in all the literature of the world"." Its simplicity and mystery, its pithiness of prose and rich cadences of language has captured the imagination of its readers through time.
Christmas is still here, the children of yesteryear have grown older, there are newer and more children, but the soul of Christmas is missing in a divisive world of conflict and intolerance and loss of fellowship. We were an inclusive, multicultural and pluralistic nation, but the winds of resentment and bigotry are blowing us apart.
