Lots of people have asked me “Does Mumbai do anything for Christmas?” to which the answer is a shouty, loud, obnoxious “YES!”. A different question I’ve also been asked is “How did you celebrate Christmas in Mumbai?” to which the answer is, “By hiding away at home.”
This year marked what is arguably Jasper’s first ‘normal’ Christmas, although technically it’s his third. His first Christmas was spent very enjoyably but involuntarily trapped in Myanmar at the height of the pandemic. His second was spent fatherless in Jersey while Dylan languished alone in an empty apartment in Mumbai. Third time’s a charm! This year all our Christmas wishes came true and we spent the day together as a family, at home, by choice. Dylan didn’t get any extra time off, not even a day in lieu for the 25th falling on a Sunday, so we had only a regulation weekend during which to celebrate.
This is also the first year that Jasper has been aware of what’s going on, and with his increased cognition comes the weighty responsibility of creating the magic of Christmas for him. It’s a responsibility I shoulder alone, as Dylan not only doesn’t subscribe to the same hibernation-based traditions as I do, but he is also part-Grinch. Where I see warming, ambient candlelight and the cosy aroma of pine trees and cinnamon, he sees a fire hazard. Where I see an investment in new family traditions and the atmospheric twinkling of seasonal cheer, he sees an overpriced plastic tree which will take up valuable storage for 11 months of the year and a variation on a fire hazard. Where I smell the mulled warmth of love and taste the mincemeat of togetherness he sees the need to feign any and all illnesses to get out of ingesting anything associated with a spiced, British Christmas. Creating the magic of Christmas is also a challenge that is made considerably harder by living somewhere which doesn’t really ‘do’ Christmas, at least, not as I recognise it. At least in Jersey last year, as much as we missed Dylan, most of the hard work in bringing Christmas to life as a skin-tingling festive spectacle was done for me by the garden centre, the town square and the radio.
My search for the Mumbai chapter of The Christmas Magic began on December 3rd, the day after Jasper’s birthday. It seemed only fair to let him turn two before flooding his imagination and our home with a whole new audiovisual language which will promptly disappear the day before Dylan’s birthday on New Year’s Eve. Not to jingle my own bells, but I think I did a pretty good job of filtering Mumbai’s chaotic cacophony of commoditized Christmas in a way which let only the important parts into our home. It’s fair to say that I made a couple of poor choices along the way, but we will know for next year what to adopt, what to import and what to ignore.
First things first: food. All the Bublé in the world wouldn’t make up for there not being something delicious to eat on the day itself, and with this in mind, the first thing I did was to pre-order some turkey breast and baked ham to arrive ready-to-eat at lunch time on Christmas Day. The benefit of living somewhere that doesn’t really celebrate Christmas is that delivery services still operate on the 25th December. The disadvantage is that essential festive foodstuffs such as turkey, or ham, or piggies in blankets are not available in raw form to cook at home. The availability issue isn’t seasonal, I should note. It’s an ongoing problem. The quality and variety of produce here is pretty dire year round sadly, but my tolerance of the situation is dramatically diminished around Christmas. I ignored the fact that my order amounted to enough food for 10-12 people on the basis that we would enjoy it cold. That between two and a half of us, we have already consumed the last honeyed ham chunk and the final juicy turkey slice just three days after Christmas speaks volumes for quite how delicious it was. Not having to babysit a turkey for hours on Christmas morning is a tradition I am eager to adopt for the long term. I did roast a few spuds and steam some wilting carrots in the spirit of making a personal contribution to the meal, however.
I have been making and eating mince pies for weeks now. I turned to my faithful old lifeline The British Corner Shop (britishcornershop.co.uk) to ship in mincemeat and mulling spices back in October, so concerned was I about a Christmas without Dylan’s nemeses. It turns out that mince pies appeal directly to the Indian palette, with their excess of sugar, so besides Jasper who will scoff down anything if it means he can delay his nap, I have also managed to convert our neighbours and Dylan’s colleagues to my “Dylan is a fool not to like these” doctrine. Dylan promised to make an effort to eat one mince pie for every two I had, in solidarity, but that was before he was struck down by an aggressive flu which took his enthusiasm away with his appetite. All the more for me, then. I had tried to source readymade shortcrust pastry as a back up if I didn’t feel like hand making it each time, but I failed in this mission. Asking the other mums in the compound only led me to a never-ending line of puff-pastry suppliers. I am still not sure if the other mums don’t know what shortcrust is, or if it’s simply that they don’t understand how crucial it is to the perfect mince pie. Needless to say, I had to make my own.
Every restaurant, every shop, every artisanal bakery I follow on Instagram bombarded me with offers and specials for the ‘holiday season’. I was seduced by the idea of a ‘DIY gingerbread house’ kit, despite having never made one of these before in my life. I was about two walls and one roof panel in before I realised that it’s not a tradition I’ll keep. Not only did my poor decorative skills (I blame the frosting they provided) result in a house of horrors but I also couldn’t get my head around whether or not I was meant to eat it. It seemed silly to store it in the fridge and not look at it - silly in principal, that is, it was a relief not to look at my handiwork - but it also seemed questionable in terms of food safety standards to leave it out on the table in an apartment that regularly reaches above 30 degrees when the air con is switched off. In the end, I took some angry photos, ate the door and the rest went in the bin about two days after I built it. Dylan politely declined to try it on account of his flu.
Besides the short-lived gingerbread house, our apartment gained some more welcome, carefully selected Christmas decorations. I say “carefully selected” because, to my surprise, Christmas decorations are easy to buy in Mumbai. All year round, from a street of stores dedicated to epilepsy-inducing disco lights, dancing Santas and garish garlands. What’s more difficult is to dig through the tackiness to find the few items that will combine to look more expensive than they really were. We made a trip to one of these stores after having played two hours of touch rugby on the first Sunday of December which not only meant that our own decision-making powers were sharpened by a need to get home to a shower, but also that we were afforded more elbow room to move around the otherwise crowded shop on account of our undeniably sweaty stench. We chose fast: a 5 foot plastic tree with snow-tipped branches, some understated gold ornaments, some lights which needed replacing after less than 24 hours, a wreath for our door and a polystyrene snowman to distract Jasper from trying to clamber onto the flashing reindeer statue. Dylan can’t look at wreaths without remembering the year that an opportunist snake took up residence in the wreath his mother had attached to their Queensland door; the first and last time they had a wreath. We don’t have those kinds of issues in the UK, needless to say. As soon as we got home, and had showered, and had eaten lunch and Jasper had woken up from his nap, we constructed and decorated our new tree. Together with an eponymous Christmas candle that I found online, and one of Spotify’s many Christmas playlists on repeat, the new tree set just the right shimmering, golden tone. For us, that is. Our eight-year-old neighbour, on an early morning visit, asked me “Why doesn’t your tree have more colour on it?” to which I found myself responding, “Because I don’t like colour.” His disdain was palpable. And I can understand why. There is barely a shop window in Mumbai which isn’t obscured by stickers of Santas, sleighs, trees and snowmen. Reds and greens and pinks and blues cascade from seasonal installations in an explosion of tinsel and tat. Lights flash, music blares and families cause blockages in heavily adorned doorways trying to take the perfect selfie with no regard for through traffic. If Christmas in Jersey was a warm hug, in Mumbai it is a cage fight with a guerilla army of disgraced elves who belch out Christmas decorations in between punches.
And so to the story of Christmas. Or, stories, I should say. If there is one film that defines Christmas for me, it’s The Snowman. I love everything about that animation from the storyline, to the music, to the dream of a white Christmas. I introduced Jasper to The Snowman on YouTube this year and am happy to report that he fell instantly in love. We must have watched it twenty times already, at his request and have even enjoyed the musical score as accompaniment to car journeys, again, at his request. While out looking for birthday presents for Jasper, I had stumbled on a bookshop filled with Christmas books back in November, and so on December 3rd, Jasper’s library swelled to incorporate The Night Before Christmas, The Twelve Days of Christmas (which he insists must be sung), a light up musical Christmas story about some woodland creatures and a board book of the Nativity Story (a much simplified version). We also had the Twelve Days of Australian Christmas which came to Asia with Tony and which opens with “On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me, an emu up a gum tree.” An epic, if lesser known, tale of the ecological side effects of true love.
As I was reading the Nativity Story one day, painfully ploughing through the eight pages being repeatedly corrected by Jasper for calling the horse a donkey and the cow an ox, and failing completely to explain what an angel was or why three Kings had brought such wildly inappropriate gifts for a baby, I realised I might have to work harder than just one book to help Jasper understand the backstory to all the gift-giving and gluttony. I don’t remember how I learned it, but I imagine a lot of it was absorbed through school, church and the December programming on scheduled TV. Jasper won’t have many, if any, of those channels drip-feeding the religious message of Christmas into his little sponge mind, so I am open to suggestions as to how we can bring that side of things to the forefront next year. Jasper’s second favourite Christmas movie, after The Snowman, is Shaun The Sheep: The Flight Before Christmas, and that doesn’t help me at all.
Having decided that for our first year in India we would observe and explore everything that Mumbai has to offer, and in the spirit of leaving no stone unturned in my search for the magic of Christmas, I decided that on Christmas Eve, we should venture out to a couple of events. The first was a live music session which, while not overtly promising Christmas music, had a festive-looking invite. It was free to attend and was taking place on the sports fields in front of one of Mumbai’s oldest members clubs, the Bombay Gymkhana. It was also one of the very, very few activities to start before 11am, which made it all the more appealing to those of us with an early bird toddler. What I overlooked in my eagerness to participate in whatever Mumbai had to offer was the Indian propensity for ear-splitting volumes when it comes to music. Actually, once it reaches the decibel levels that the general public seem to enjoy here, it is so distorted that it probably no longer deserves to be referred to as music. You might have heard this particular concert from wherever in the world you are. Perhaps you thought it was an earthquake or a powerline exploding or a banshee dying. As soon as they finished their sound check (I think this means checking that there is nobody in Mumbai who can’t hear the sound), it became very clear to us that we needed to move our picnic mat a long way back from the stage. We really need to get Jasper a pair of festival earmuffs if he is to survive his early childhood in India with his hearing intact. As the band screamed and bawled and banged and raged their way through pop-song after pop-song, so the clanging in Dylan’s and my heads intensified. In the end we didn’t last the full two hours and left feeling as though we’d been tortured. We probably won’t be attending one of those events again, or at least, not with that particular band.
In the afternoon of Christmas Eve, I had lined us up to go to a Christmas fair at a shopping mall, and despite still reeling from the morning’s disaster, I pushed ahead with the plan. Suffice to say that was the first and last time I attend anything in a shopping centre. It was crowded and loud and not even a tiny bit festive. My reasoning had been that it was nice for Jasper to experience the excitement of Christmas in as many settings as possible, but the only way he was going to get excitement from that hullabaloo was if there had been a ball pit. And there wasn’t. We stayed as long as it took to order, receive and down a pint of entirely uncalled-for experimental mead and hot-footed it back to the tranquillity of our apartment, serenaded by Aled Jones as we went. I felt let down, by my own poor judgement more than by the event itself, for having chosen to ignore all the warning signs that an event in a shopping mall would be the epitome of a soulless, commercial turn on the festive bandwagon. Dylan was kinder than I was to myself, saying “I admire your enthusiasm and the lengths you have gone to to bring Christmas alive for Jasper. But we are never doing anything like that again. Ever.”
Christmas Day was then the perfect antidote to Christmas Eve; we didn’t leave our home. Faded were the horrors of the day before, and vivid and bright was the pure joy on Jasper’s face as he opened his stocking and his gifts. The most memorable moment for me was when I caught Jasper trying and hopelessly failing to suppress the happiness he so clearly felt as he watched Dylan and I playing charades across the lunch table. He would watch Dylan’s actions, look to me to interpret “It’s a movie, two words”, and then would turn back to Dylan to see what tomfoolery followed. The corners of his little mouth were fighting to turn upwards, despite his best attempts to keep a straight face, and his eyes were dancing with love and enjoyment. When I asked him how he was feeling, his response was “Japper too, too happy. Japper having fun. Baba and Mummy funny.”
Forget the decorations, the books, the music, the food and the outside world in its entirety. That was the magic of Christmas. So, if you are in the neighbourhood this time next year, you know where you’ll find us. Hiding.
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