The spotlight on Christmas and its growing popularity

2 long weekends back to back! Life seemed so exciting during the last month of 2015. Planning parties, enjoying shopping, meeting family and just relaxing. The buzz and excitement was so apparent in the air that even playing fun games in office was enjoyable!

Over the last few years, I have seen a lot of my non-Christian friends, celebrating Christmas. They may not do it in its proper form with prayers and mid night masses, but they do have a Christmas Tree around, get Santa gifts for their children, dress up in festive colors and look forward to attending their Christmas parties.

Personally, I enjoy the Christmas time immensely. I would initially blame it on my Convent education- For 14 years, the only thing we mandatory celebrated in school was Christmas with preparations beginning as early as October! But now, it’s spread like wild fire, at least in metros. It is the talk of the town-Which Christmas cake did you get? How was the party? Did you have Santa in your party?

The spotlight on Christmas and its growing popularity makes me wonder, is Christmas taking over the Diwali euphoria amongst us Indians?

We love our festivals, we love what it takes to celebrate them in their truest and most pure form. But celebrating Diwali does come with a lot of clauses- the cleaning of the house, the painting, the new curtains, the traditional wear, the Diwali gift distribution (a must, specially up North!), the puja preparations, the colour and design of the electric lights in the house, the competition of best rangoli and house decorations, the sweets, the crackers, and again the competition on the crackers!

Compared to all that, Christmas is silently enjoyable. It is stress-free, gift-free (except for the kids, which is fun), decoration-free (how much time does it really take to put the tree up) and right now competition free!

Christmas is fast gaining popularity to be the next family uniting festival, where the father dresses up as Santa and the kids gets gifts and family enjoys a laughter filled meal together.

Christmas’s growing popularity (and I must add, Halloween’s addition as a festival) does show how united we are as a nation and how we just need reasons for celebrations!

But considering how Big and Important Diwali has been in our lives, have we made it larger than life in our heads that it’s getting difficult now for working couples, non-joint family couples to manage the expectations around it? Is the stress around making Diwali successful burdening us too much? Is it time for us to re-image Diwali in our heads- from the over the top Karan Johar Movies, to real life subtle Imtiaz Ali style?

And last question: Has Santa already come in our towns, and we are silently enjoying it?