Hello December, You Beauty!
Hello December, You Beauty!
Hello December, thank you for being you. You always make me feel like a child again. My childhood December was not all about Christmas alone. Though I loved December for n number of things, Christmas holds a special place among them all. Being born and brought up in a small village my childhood holidays were more about playing in our backyard than at home.
By the end of November, my Grandma would hire her best people to clean our small patch of land and make it ready for the watering session until the upcoming monsoon season. Among-st the arecanut trees, coconut palms and plantain trees, we children always found the shade of our dear mango tree the best place to rest in the afternoons. We were so obsessed about climbing trees that our poor Guava tree had to bear it all. While resting under our small tree fort, I don’t remember if we cared the slightest about our hands getting dirty playing in the mud. Often our Grandma would scold us for breaking those small pathways of water; her men had built on the land. We were least worried about the snakes that would occasionally cross our paths.
The Christmas exams, the celebration at school and finally the vacations, may be these three things made up our December too. Mostly, our school closed a day or two before the Christmas. A lot of Christmas greeting cards for friends, family and those tiny ones which I still preserve, stay very close to my heart.
There awaits the biggest task of our whole year, the Christmas crib and the Christmas tree. Since childhood, we have heard that Jesus Christ was born in a barn. And our idea of Christmas crib came from there. Our backyard barn was filled with loads of haystacks, so was our Christmas crib. A fully decorated hay shed. The Magi, the shepherds, Mother Mary, Joseph and our dear Jesus Christ, all of them had their special places. The lambs and cattle would all stare at Jesus Christ while eating their sprouted mustard greens, made by my dear mother. A perfectly lit crib. Every year by this time my mother would have prepared her dear money plant to be our Christmas tree. The fairy lights, the tree décor everything over-weighed on her shoulders. Her leaves often turned brown by the heat of those teeny-tiny fairy lights .
On Christmas Eve we all would eagerly wait for our Santa to come home, actually plenty of them. Back then, the Christmas carols fascinated us a lot. We would wait to have those orange candies that every Santa brings, some cashew shaped cookies and above all, his dance moves.
I know cakes and pastries are an unavoidable part of our lives now. But, there was a time when those hard sugar icing cakes made our mouths watery, an era of cakes before butter cream and fresh cream invaded our lives. Me and my sister would fight for those colorful flower icing on the top of the cake.
Then comes the Christmas day. We belong to a church which holds early morning holy mass rather than those midnight ones. And I was not one of those early birds. So in my school days, I always wondered why they can’t keep it at midnight ?
The delicious non vegetarian lunch after 25 days of lent used to be our biggest meal of the whole year. How can I forget to mention about the movies? Those days’ new movie releases on television were a big part of our celebrations. The anticipation to watch them can never be explained through words. A generation who had no clue of skip ads that would creep in their television screens later on. I don’t know how we had that patience to watch a 120 minute movie for a whole afternoon. The Merry Christmas that would accompany every ad made us literally happy.
Days of celebrations, fun and deep thoughts of New Year resolutions, all these made you so special my December. That was all about a small village millennial’s treasured childhood Christmas memories and thank you for making them so memorable.
With lots of love,
Your dear Admirer.
