All I want for Christmas…
Christmas midst COVID. Dayadari asks me what I want for Christmas. Christmas in a Buddhist household? Yes, because “Christmas”, here, is not about religion: it’s is about my mother. And her Christmas lunch.
As children of a mixed marriage (Sinhalese-Buddhist and Burgher-Christian) we were at home in both Buddhist and Christian festivals (and also, for seasonal fare, Hindu and Muslim ones, courtesy of our growing circle of friends). Yes, we celebrated Christmas, but in a muted way –with gifts, crackers, Love cake and Breudher when we were little and, when we were not so young, with only a festive lunch.
Then, when we were all grown, but not yet married, Lloyd and Rita, two little, very little, kids both below four years, came to live with us, freeing their father to care for his terminally ill wife. They made our lives that much richer and groomed us for parenting long before we had families of our own. With them we learned to give of ourselves (grumblingly but unconditionally) and one of the things we gave them was Christmas as a day of joy for these two little Christians whose mother had died some months before. We had an (inexpertly and rather haphazardly) decorated Christmas tree – something we never had had before – tinsel decorations, bon-bons, balloons, presents, off-key singing, all sorts of goodies and wonderful company. It was a one-of-a-kind and never-to-be-repeated Christmas.
Eventually they went back to their father, and Christmas once again became almost humdrum: all we had was the special lunch. We all got married, had children of our own and moved away, leaving an empty nest. After some years I came back to Colombo and set up house with my parents. I had come full circle: but, this time, the responsibility was mine. It was not to last long: my father died within the year, we could not afford the house in Colombo and we moved out.
We ended up in Dehiwela. It was by chance, but it was so right for my mother who had been born, schooled and had grown up in Dehiwela. It was also where she met her husband-to-be, in the mid- 1920s, in the Temperance Movement: an unlikely fellow-campaigner, a national-dress wearing Sinhala Buddhist schoolteacher. In the heat of the battle, Love bloomed. So coming back to Dehiwela was so very right for her: this was where her roots were, and her heart.
Soon she found childhood friends and made new ones. Her Church, the Dutch Reformed Church on Station Road – she had never joined any other congregation – welcomed her, and the Pastors looked after her. Sundays became the focus of her everyday life. Next door to the Church was her old school and she was there for its 75th Anniversary. The emptiness caused by father’s death was partially filled. She had come back home.
All of us were married by then and she had many grandchildren, so she decided to revive the “lost” Christmas. They should celebrate Christmas with her. So it was at Christmas that we had a gathering of the clan, not at Sinhala New Year. Mother was Santa and the day was run according to her wishes with daughters, daughters-in-law and domestics all working as her elves. The grandchildren had a whale of a time in their own worlds, and they remember those Christmases yet, in epic terms. There was always a Christmas tree: if one did not come by train from a friend up-country, she made do with a branch from a neighbour’s Casuarina tree and, once, even a mango branch!
Then there was the ritual of handing over presents to the grandchildren in strict order of seniority, followed by the Christmas lunch. It was cooked by everyone in the kitchen and had her signature dishes, an assortment of foods: yellow rice, “lansi sambol”, ham and home-ground mustard sauce, curried eggs, minchi sambol, pickles, “fowl” curry, pappadam, fried brinjals, seeni-sambol, ambulthiyal were the staples, but there were more. Mother insisted on “Elephant House” salt beef in memory of our father who, she said, had relished it. Finally came the ice-cream, Breudher and her very own Love cake. The children carried on their raucous games and the adults (male) burped their way to a nap!
These Christmases went on for ten years before the inevitable. When she finally left us she had the Christian burial my father had charged me to give her. All the Pastors she wanted were there, all the hymns she had selected were sung and she was laid to rest by the side of her late brother. Christmas gatherings ceased. In my own nuclear family we did have a dish or two but it was not the same. And Christmas became, not just a lunch, but the day I remember her and the 15 years she lived with us and was the focus of our family get-togethers.
So, what do I want for Christmas? Both of us know what, and why. Yes of course. A Christmas Lunch like mother used to make.
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