Santas at the mall selling discount coupons don’t feel like Christmas anymore.
It is the season to be jolly. Except if you are a Santa Claus in India or rather if you have to play a Santa Claus.
Then it’s time to put on a scratchy red suit, stick on a prickly white beard or an ugly Santa mask, don a ridiculous red dunce cap and walk around the malls going Ho-Ho-Ho and offering coupons for holiday special drinks. Sometimes there is a pillow under the suit. Sometimes even that pretence is dropped, and skinny Santas and slightly potbellied Santas and drooping Santas roam around miserably looking to spread cheer.
Kolkata has always been famous for its Christmas. If Christmas is a Christian festival in Goa, in Kolkata when the sahibs departed, they left Burra Din behind and ordinary Bengalis embraced it with gusto. These days it’s bigger than ever (the lights on Park Street stay on well into January), but it’s also inevitably a mall Christmas. The young men who are hired to stand around and try and entice us to get credit cards, Jio SIMs or just part with our phone numbers for a spa coupon are pressed into service as rented Santa Clauses and add a layer of false jollity to their sales pitch. On warm winter afternoons, and Kolkata has plenty of them, it’s rather tragic to see thin men in fat suits and Christmas sandwich boards standing sweatily in the sun at the entrance to the mall, and telling us about year-end sales on televisions and home entertainment systems.
The old Christmas spirit was as fake as the cotton wool snow we sprinkled on our trees. But it was homespun kind of fake. We knew that if we peeled the beards and the red robes off those little Santa dolls we bought, small, ordinary, very desi, very cheap plastic dolls would emerge. But we willingly participated in the suspension of disbelief and that was the miracle of Christmas.
The mall-fakery is joyless because it’s slick. The canned carols, the made-up Santa, the big tree and the glossily wrapped empty gift boxes all tell a story of empty symbolism, which is everything Christmas was not in Kolkata. But most of all, it’s joyless because it’s generic. There is ultimately nothing Kolkata about it. It’s pre-packaged Christmas, which feels the same in malls all over.
But a Kolkata Christmas can be uniquely Calcuttan. It’s a far cry from the heated politically correct debates of America where the office party had to be called a holiday party as opposed to a Christmas party so as not to offend anyone. Ours was a “secular” Christmas where if there can be any such thing as middle class Bengalis did up their spindly Christmas trees, queued up for plum cake at Nahoum’s Jewish bakery, went to see the lights on Park Street and had tea and Dundee cake at Flurys patisserie that stayed open all night on Christmas eve.
Also read: India’s mean-spirited war on Christmas
The Kolkata love for plum cake baffles Westerners who think of the Christmas fruit cake as a sort of gag gift, the indestructible cake carrying in it the ghosts of Christmases past. But Kolkata’s undimmed passion for Christmas cake is almost endearing because it’s genuinely plummy, and not an affectation. Every street corner bakery has a “Christmas cake” counter piled high with loaves of plum cake. Dingy little bakeries in the narrow lanes of Taltala come alive at this time as they rent their ovens out by the hour to those who want their own cakes baked. They are charged by the kilo of sugar.
Farmers in little towns, a train ride away from Kolkata, raise turkeys and bring them to sell to Kolkata and always draw a curious crowd. What are they? asks someone. “Australian chickens,” replies a knowledgeable bystander. The city’s snooty clubs are full of Christmas parties where Bengalis can finally parade around in their fanciest sweaters and scarves and enjoy mince pies. The city’s streets are filled with the less fortunate, wearing Santa hats too and just as determined to make merry.
Christmas has always been Kolkata’s winter of content, brief but glorious. So that’s why it feels more tragic to see it put through the mall discount conveyer belt, which conveys everything but goodwill. What have we done to Santa? And what have we done to Christmas? There’s a Christmas festival but with such jostling crowds it’s easy to feel you will get trampled to death, an ignominious death in a Santa hat. Uff so crowded, say old timers, it’s like Durga Puja crowds with everyone from the suburbs coming to Kolkata to see the lights.
Actually instead of lamenting about the ghosts of Christmases past, the Kolkata Christmas can reinvent itself. It could be the Durga Puja for NRIs. This is the season when the migratory Kolkatan returns from Delhi and Mumbai and Connecticut and London. They go to Tolly Club and Calcutta Club and have whisky sours and devilled crab at Mocambo and check out the duck festival at Magnolia’s while looking at the Christmas lights, bigger, better, brighter thanks to the electric largesse of Mamata Didi.
There could be Xmas package tours complete with the mandatory Kolkata experiences – a VIP pass to get you to the head of the line at Nahoum’s for that plum cake, a selfie with the Santa at the Christmas festival in Allen Park, a night time visit to the street party of the Anglo Indians at Bow Barracks (now outnumbered by tourists) and the midnight mass at St Paul’s.
And presiding over it all will be the patron saint of Christmas, Kolkata’s own Usha Uthup caroling away at the manger on Park Street. Who needs the malls anymore? Christmas is still alive and well in Calcutta, a little more Kolkata these days than Calcutta, but as long as the plum cake is still plummy who cares.