All Change Here

2022 will be my second Christmas in Coburg, and fourth in Australia. But Christmas has always been part of my life no matter how far I’ve travelled, and so I join in the festivities wherever I may be. Even if traditions change, the spirit of giving and sense of family between everyone I meet remains, and so I look forward to this one as I have all the many Christmases before.

I grew up in southern India, which has a significant Christian population; my ancestral family hails from the Syrian Christian sect of the Orthodox Church. This little-known community finds its origins in migrant tradesmen from Syria settling on the west coast of India in the 1600s – in the present-day state of Kerala. My paternal grandparents spent several years working in England, then migrated to the neighbouring south Indian state of Tamil Nadu to raise their family. All these cultural influences and traditions came together to form the unique Christmases of my youth.

Like any family, our Christmas preparations started the moment the calendar read December 1. I remember my grandmother readying bags of ingredients to pump out tonnes of fruit cake from her hardy 1980s oven – a proper English recipe with currants and brandy! These were then distributed to everyone she could think of: the neighbours, the housemaid, her friends at church, and anyone my younger sister and I were friends with at school.

It is a tradition that carries on today, taken up by my mother now that my grandmother is in weaker health. My sister has grown from licking the bowl to making her own holiday sweet treats for family and friends. The joy and gratitude from something as simple as a shared dessert is one of the most universal symbols of Christmas to me.

But we kids had other festive fun to occupy ourselves with – most importantly, decoration. We were lucky enough to have a medium-height natural Christmas pine tree and would adorn it with old-school baubles and tinsel. We repurposed old Christmas cards by punching holes in the top and threading through so they could be hung from the staircase railings. The highlight would be the colourful cardboard star that would hang in the front porch and light up at night. This is common practice in India not just among Christians, but anyone who wanted to celebrate – though it led to a bit of competition in school between classmates to get a fancier star than the others!

I attended an all-girls convent-run school until Year 7, so naturally they celebrated Christmas with great vigour, and it was enjoyed by students of all denominations alike. I remember they had the most enormous natural pine tree, nearly eleven feet tall – they needed a crane to get the little angel on top! Sadly the tree fell shortly before I changed schools and has since been replaced by a concrete imitation of the Pieta. But it was always a highlight for all the girls to gather round and watch the huge tree being decorated. They would also give us each an orange before we headed to special mass!

On the subject of mass and school holidays, we would spend them every December visiting my mother’s parents, who lived in the southern capital city of Hyderabad. It was a 16-hour journey each way by train! In the 90s and early 2000s travelling by plane wasn’t so affordable, and the sophisticated network of the Indian Railways means you can get nearly anywhere by train. I remember poring over the maps of rail lines, trying to stay awake to catch the train crossing the state borders and inevitably falling asleep. It set into stone a fascination with railways that remains to this day – as if I was destined to settle in Victoria! But that’s a story for another time…

This was where we learnt all our Christmas music; my maternal grandparents would lead morning prayers with a Christmas Eve hymn, and my great-uncle next door would bash out carols on his record player and the piano. Though we attended Christmas Day service, we never went in for midnight mass on Christmas Eve; my mother was convinced the kids would simply fall asleep. The one time I remember pestering her to take us to midnight mass, that is exactly what happened.

Our Christmas Day meals were a fascinating mix of cultures. Breakfast was according to the Syrian Christian tradition (also followed on other occasions such as Easter and the breaking of Lent): fluffy fermented rice and coconut pancakes called appam, accompanied by a humble chicken and potato stew. Lunch, however, was a large flavourful platter of mutton biryani – the most famous dish of Hyderabad and our substitute for roast ham!

But perhaps the real oddity about my Christmases is that the 25th of December also happens to be my sister’s birthday. So the myth of Santa Claus faded very quickly in our household – our parents couldn’t both pretend to be Santa and not give her presents! It meant she enjoyed plenty of extra attention and got to pick what we had for dinner (it was usually the biggest novelty of our age, McDonald’s).

I haven’t spent Christmas with my family in person in a while, but the spirit they infused into the holidays resonates as I walk through the streets of Coburg. The birthday presents I sent my sister this year come from the Coburg Makers’ Market; I will be having a big biryani lunch at my favourite place in Foleys Mall. I am no baker myself, but I can still get a nice cake from Sydney Road to share with my housemates. And the tree in Victoria Street Mall is decorated just as we used to do ours!

No matter where you go, I have found that warm hearts and open minds can create a Christmas as special as any other. And to the good folks of Coburg, wherever you may have come from, near or far – I hope all your Christmases are as joyful as the ones you’ve known before.