By Piyali Bhattacharya

As we all recover from Thanksgiving weekend, I thought it might be time to write about how Desis do ‘The Holidays’. Not a particularly feminist issue, but one that is definitely on my mind as the holiday seasons rockets (Rockettes anyone?) into full swing and I can hardly walk by a Starbucks without being tempted by an Egg Nogg Latte.

I love the holidays. The month between Thanksgiving and Christmas is unabashedly my favorite time of year… maybe second only to Durga Puja. But the fact is that Durga Puja is only Durga Puja in Calcutta. And Thanksgiving and Christmas? Well, you’ve got to give it to New York. She does Christmas with style. As I walked to work from the subway this morning, I couldn’t help but be cheered by decorative Christmas lights, the promise of warmth and nutmeg-covered sweets in every café, women sporting the latest fashions in coats and gloves, and of course, the big one, the tree at Rockefeller Center. There’s something about that tree and the ice skating rink in front of it that will always be magical to me. Mostly, the American assertion on every billboard, TV and coffee mug that your holidays are a time to be peaceful, joyous and bask in the glow of family and friends is a difficult line not to fall for.

So what does the shiny, sparkly holiday season mean to most Desis? As I see it, Desis do the holidays in one of three ways: i) Puritanically, where they follow all the rules and traditions and have fun making turkey with stuffing while putting up a Christmas tree, ii) Passively, where Thanksgiving is a time to be with family, maybe add some butter chicken to the menu, or iii) Inactively, where the few days off in December is seen as the time to visit South Asia.

In my own family, we follow a combination of the first and the third. If we’re in the States for the holidays, we do it right: There’s turkey, pumpkin pie, and sparkling cider in tall stemmed glasses at Thanksgiving. All our friends come over and I’ve made a tradition of decorating a tree over Thanksgiving weekend. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade is on TV and by 8pm, we’re all in a food coma. In December we buy tickets to The Nutcracker ballet and drink hot cocoa while contemplating ice skating (though we never make it to the rink). We watch the ball drop on TV on the 31st and clink our glasses when Dick Clark tells us to. We wear red and green and make life as festive as possible.

Or we go in the totally opposite direction and leave for India as soon as school is out, eagerly awaiting shopping trips in Calcutta without the burning sun, or time spent with family drinking chai on the veranda where it’s impossible to sit in the summer.

But what is the common thread among all these ways of celebrating? To me, it’s family… and the close friends who become family. My brother and I grew up in an extremely loving but sometimes lonely house, with nobody but our parents to call family around us. We didn’t notice there was anything missing until we came of age and realized that most people spent the holidays with hordes of other people. And so, as we got older, our parents’ friends in the community and our friends from school and college became our family, and we invited them into our home and called them ours, and slowly, even my parents forgot to miss their relatives back “home.”

My point is that unless you’re one of the incredibly lucky people to have a lot of family in this country, the holiday season for most Desis I know is about forging the family that we do have in this context. Whether that’s the family we make from the people we choose to love, or the family that’s made for us, the holidays are a time to enjoy those people in your life. And no, we don’t need a Christmas tree to do that, especially since most of us aren’t even Christian. But sometimes, it’s fun to make everyone choose an ornament and crunch a candy cane while Frank Sinatra sings in the background.

Happy Holidays!

About the author:
Piyali Bhattacharya is an American-born Desi writer who contributes pieces about South Asian American Feminisms to EGO every fortnight. Please send comments to her at piyali.ego@gmail.com or to EGO at info@egothemag.com

Images courtesy of Romit Bhattacharya