Kamin Mohammadi
My first Christmas in Britain was in 1979. I was nine. London was more monochrome then than it is now but, suddenly, unexpectedly, in December, it decked itself out in lights and sparkled with the magic of Christmas. People sang in the streets and smiled at strangers, a different place from the reserved city in which we had arrived only six months before, having fled the revolution in Iran.
We were living in a small flat that was the opposite of our house in Tehran with its rose garden and fruit trees, waiting for real life to recommence. At that point, we still thought that everything would blow over and that we would soon return to our country. In the meantime, while treading water in London, my parents sent us to a language school to learn English and for the first time that winter, Christmas properly penetrated my consciousness.
Back then, Christmas started some time in December, when modest decorations appeared in the shops and the lights went on in high streets, not immediately after Halloween, as now. In fact, it crept up on us and we only decided to get a Christmas tree and decorate the flat after mid-December had passed.
In Iran, Christmas wasn’t part of our calendar. Our nextdoor neighbours had been a Christian Armenian family, their blond boys my best friends. They had celebrated in January, and I had always wished them happy Christmas, not quite sure what it really meant. For us Iranians, the big festival of the year is Noruz, Iranian new year on the vernal equinox around 21 March. We knew about Father Christmas and the tree through films and books from the west, but 25 December, falling as it did in the middle of winter months far from the end of the Iranian year, went by unnoticed. In fact, on what was Christmas Day, we were at school.
My first Christmas experience was kick-started by a school visit to Oxford Street in London to see the lights and look at Selfridges’ Christmas windows. The department store’s grand facade was lit up and decked with little Christmas trees, the vitrines adorned in miniature scenes of winter, each telling a story, minute figures ranged around snowy settings busy acting out the festive narrative, which spilled from one window to the next. I remember the crowds and pushing my way through them to press my face as close to the windows as I could. I was enchanted, and talked about it with such wonder at home later that we visited again as a family. Thus was born our first Christmas tradition – the annual festive visit to see the lights on Oxford Street and gasp at Selfridges’ windows.
After that, my parents decided that it would be nice for us kids to celebrate Christmas, despite not being Christian. They wanted us to feel part of this new society we were inhabiting, and they wanted to cheer us up. Although none of us ever talked about it, we were all engulfed in depression at so abruptly leaving home, traumatised at being separated from family and friends. Christmas gave us a chance to put the fear behind us, to celebrate the sanctuary that Britain had given us by adopting its most important festival. My mother went to Harrods to buy a tree – the destination to find anything she wasn’t quite sure about in those first months – bringing home a box of baubles and multicoloured tinsel, too. My sister and I happily decorated the tree – a real one whose abundance of needles we found speared through socks for months after. They were so prolific that it was the last real tree we had.
Christmas did cheer us up in that lonely first year in London. My sister and I were thrilled at the prospect of receiving presents – it was the first morning since arriving in London that I can remember waking up excited. And my parents were distracted by inventing new traditions and rituals for us to embrace. My mother learned how to cook a turkey so well that, to this day, there is nothing more delicious to me than her Christmas lunch, and we gathered around the television to watch the Queen’s message.
The years passed, things didn’t blow over in Iran and we stayed in London. Now, once a year, I, too, sing in the streets and smile at strangers. And we still visit Selfridges’ Christmas windows each December as an expanded family, accompanied now by my partner and his children, too.
Anita Sethi
I was still young enough to harbour a hope that Santa might be flying from the north pole to my hometown in northern England, that his reindeers might soon swoop through the murky skies of Manchester, bringing me everything I had wished for, when I placed a mince pie, a carrot and a glass of milk beneath the chimney of my childhood home. I had, after all, been quite a good girl.
As I waited and wished through the night, I wondered about the existence of Santa, God and the tooth fairy. And I wondered why was I – a brown girl, who had not long before lit sparklers to celebrate Diwali, the Hindu festival of light – now waiting for Santa, after helping my mother to decorate the tree with stars, baubles and a crowning angel? Some stories are of such force in the imagination that they cut through religion, race and class, achieving universality.
Christmas was a tale of two homes for me, as my parents divorced when I was five. Sometimes, after mornings at home with my mother, my father would collect us and take us to my grandmother’s house. She lived above her shop that curved around a corner of Stretford near Lancashire’s cricket ground. She worked in the shop most days, but – like everything back in those days – it was closed for Christmas.
My grandmother had 27 grandchildren, and would shop at the Asian textile warehouses in Manchester for gifts for the grandkids, many of whom made her living room the epicentre of the world for Christmas. Over the festive period, as well as turkey we would eat Indian food – dal and rice and burfi (an Indian sweet) from the “curry mile” in Rusholme. In that same living room, I had recently acted out the part of Hanuman the monkey god in the ancient Indian epic the Ramayana, which my cousins, siblings and I play-acted. I had leapt across the living room, which was transformed by the imagination into a giant lake.
Such stories from different cultures made me aware of a world of narratives, rich and varied, that can coexist in the imagination. I was variously an angel in a nativity play and a monkey god in an Indian epic. I loved The Snowman as a child, especially the soundtrack, and every year I’d watch that (and attempt to build a real one if enough snow fell), along with films on TV such as Back to the Future, as well as the classic Indian film Disco Dancer, which often played at my grandmother’s house.
Christmas was ubiquitous, so it was difficult not to partake: at school, carols were sung, the nativity play acted, Advent calendars opened. But friendships were also forged across cultural divides throughout the year, so I have memories of attending friends’ barmitzvahs, for example.
The year was a blend of light and dark; Diwali celebrations exploded into bonfire night and melted into Christmas, which also entailed an annual visit to the glittering Blackpool illuminations and bright balls in the Funhouse. Then, after the bleak new year, the wash of colours of Holi, the festival of spring.
These days, I am not religious, though my extended family has many religions in it. My brother’s wife is Muslim, so my nieces, Asha and Layla, and nephew Hari celebrate Eid, too, to add to the array of annual festivities. On Christmas Eve, my nieces will also lay out a mince pie, carrot and glass of milk for Santa and his reindeers, and write him a letter. This year I’m hoping to read to them from The Girl Who Saved Christmas by Matt Haig – because celebrating Christmas is also about storytelling. As the far right takes hold across the world, the ability to recognise and appreciate varying viewpoints and sharing stories from different cultures is vital. Stories can be the greatest of all gifts.
Charlotte Mendelson
“They tried to kill us, we escaped, let’s eat.”
This cheery summary of Jewish festivals may distress you. You may prefer the December holidays to be a season of light-hearted consumerism, when we mark the birth of Jesus by telling children that an obese, sherry-loving bachelor will climb into their houses at night and leave small gifts in hosiery. Surely there should be no place for death, or darkness?
Perhaps you’re right. But how else are Jews to face the fact that all our festivals commemorate attempts to exterminate us? How can we teach our children sweet little songs about Passover or Hanukah without mentioning the point of it all: slavery, plagues, oppression, bloodshed?
As all parents know, the answer is distraction. Give the kids enough sugar, in the form of cake or, better yet, anything deep-fried, and they’ll accept whatever you tell them. It’s a festive miracle. And it works.
Luckily for British Jews, the birthday of the infant redeemer is also about eating. This may be a godless, post-truth age, but the average Christmas table still groans with the foodstuffs of yesteryear: Bailey’s Pumpkin Spice liqueur, eggnog ice cream and gluten-free Thai-style stuffing. So it shouldn’t be difficult to create a fusion, should it? Particularly this year when, spookily, the first night of Hanukah and Christmas Eve coincide? Hanumas, Christukah (we’ll argue later): a perfect combination of latkes, mincemeat, stilton, When Harry Met Sally and only the most raucous carols. That’s the way, in adulthood, I play it. For my Jewish atheist parents, forging a secular path in 1970s Oxford, things were more complicated.
My Church of England primary school was hardcore about Christmas, so it was unfortunate when Hanukah coincided with the end of the Christmas term. After a long day of holy baby Jesus, I would barely have the energy to light the multicoloured candles my father bore proudly home from Paddington. Then the trouble would begin. My mother disapproved of Hanukah but, in the unsoundable depths of their marriage, a compromise had been reached. While my father speed-read prayers she would sit, arms crossed, rolling her eyes and saying: “Maurice! How much longer?” Then we’d sing Maoz Tsur, a mysterious festive song. No presents, no games, no sweeties.
What of the other cultural highlights? Our Christmas tree was a Swiss cheese plant wound with tinsel; our only real tradition was the construction of a cardboard Hansel and Gretel house from a kit, which we would plaster thickly with icing and then watch as the Lebkuchen slid off. Carols were awkward: too many references to “captive Israel”. I would bow my head and mime. And what to do about nativity plays? Just how Jewish was Joseph allowed to be?
The holy day itself was much like that of normal families. At least, normal north Oxford families. We would open stockings stuffed with pre-tangled Slinky springs and strawberry-scented pencils; we would wrest the paper from rollerskates (for my sister) and, for me, encyclopedias and, one glorious festive morn, a Texas Instruments Little Professor calculator on which I could perfect my maths.
Obviously, we had to eat. Ceremoniously, my father would make his best, indeed only, breakfast: real orange-juice, from frozen concentrate, and bubaleh, a sweetened omelette, the legacy of his Polish father. Then, while my grandmother started basting, he would take us to Port Meadow, the ancient common land that was the closest we ever came to wilderness. If one ignored the snowy thistles and horse droppings, it was a virginal, Arctic paradise, particularly the year when we fashioned skis out of red Formica planks from a skip and, on the slope-free grass, pretended to be having the time of our lives.
Better (worse) still was skating. Occasionally, the meadow flooded, then froze. My father, imagining himself as Goethe, bought a pair of ice skates at a jumble sale; they fitted none of us. That was the least of our problems. The ice was ridged with frozen tussocks; there was nothing to hold on to. While other children executed camel spins, we would take it in turns to inch towards the murky edge, ankles twisting, fingers raw, fail to stand up and eventually, sobbing, be allowed home.
Then, hosannah, we could eat. In another confusing shift from, or towards, tradition, our Christmas meal was goose, red cabbage, stollen, walnuts and marzipan. It was 19th-century Transcarpathia, apart from the occasional beeps from the handheld Game & Watch hand-sets my early-adopter grandmother had bought, and my muffled sobbing about my score on the Little Professor.
I have moved on, somewhat. At Hanumas I give books, but also large plastic electronic items; we have roast beef, red cabbage, and Cadbury’s Heroes; there is tinsel. We sing a quick bastardised chorus of Maoz Tsur, but I still don’t have the faintest idea what it means. We eat and argue. It’s the perfect Hanumas.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
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