Christmas is the one time of the year that my family does what people on TV do. Mad rushing to get presents? Check. Grand Christmas feast with a turkey and all the trimmings? Check. Indulging in icewine and gorgonzola in front of the fire like they do on those Food TV specials? Super-gluttonous, you-best-believe-it check. Yeah, when it comes to late December, we are the Christmasiest Punjabis this side of a… Gurdwara at the North Pole? Yeah, I don’t really know how to finish that.
It’s precisely that mirroring of what’s “out there” and what happens in our home that has endeared Christmas to me. Though I love Christmas for a whole slew of reasons (not the least of which is the burst of colour at the grayest, darkest time of year) part of it is definitely because it’s then that my life most resembles what I see in that odd thing we call “public space”.
That’s a weirdly conformist, assimilationist thing to say, I know. But when you’re a minority, much of the day-to-day ritual and tenor of your life is something you don’t really see reflected back at you. The little things that made up my life—the rustle of saris and salwar kameez; the sights and smells of chapatis being made; the mundane ordinariness of bi-culturalism—were always missing from popular culture. There was never that comforting feeling of watching TV and thinking “oh, right, I’m just like these people”. What was private and what was public just never seemed to quite match up
It’s no coincidence, then, that my parents started celebrating Christmas for precisely those reasons. What, after all, is assimilation other than a desire to make public and private one and the same? So we did and still do Christmas very British/Canadian style, just like they do on TV; it’s all decorated trees, cheese and crackers, and ole’ Bing on the stereo. If during January to November we mostly live life in our own hybrid, bi-cultural way, then in December it’s Whitey McWhitetown in the Alang household.
We form our identities in the back and forth between public and private. Much of the time, there’s a pleasure in the ways those things don’t match up, particularly when you’re privileged enough to be able to move back and forth between cultures like it ain’t no thing. But in as much as British and Canadian tradition is part of my life and identity (i.e. a lot), sometimes it’s nice to uncritically embrace that side of things, even if it is just one month a year. It’s almost like sometimes you need relief from not seeing your own life reflected in popular culture, and you just want to take a break. And while there’s something undeniably great about hybridity or celebrating festivals like Diwali, it’s occasionally nice to claim “Western” culture as your own, and simply kick back and have a white Christmas.
