First Christmas

The holiday season is here, and although I think I was ahead in planning this year, I am still feeling overwhelmed by the shopping, entertaining house guests, school events etc. This takes me back to my first Christmas in the US.

I had arrived in the US in October as a poor graduate student's wife without the requisite visas to work or study. In the mid-west it was already colder than anything I was used to so I spent a lot of time inside my tiny apartment with not much more than a radio for entertainment. By end of November (yes, back then they still waited until after Thanksgiving to kick off the Christmas season) the airwaves were swamped with holiday ads. The overwhelming theme was shopping and stress resulting from shopping. Growing up in a country where Christians are a small minority and the economy was closed, Christmas didn't really register. We got a day off from school, and the couple of Christians in our neighborhood hung a star shaped lantern outside their house. If not for that, I don't think we would even know about Christmas. Of course I knew of Santa and assumed that the children in a Christian house each got a toy, everyone went to church and that was Christmas - a rather staid and boring holiday, that didn't even come close to the really fun Hindu holidays such as Holi & Diwali. Coming from that background, all the shopping frenzy and the stress implied by the radio hosts and ads, made no sense whatsoever. When I met my American sister-in-law during the season that first year, I asked her my naive question "Why is Christmas about shopping? I quite can't connect the two". She looked at me as if I was a cave-dweller who had just stepped out from some jungle into modern civilization. She was completely at loss as to how to answer my question, not sure where to begin. She looked helplessly at my brother-in-law and said "haven't you told your family about Santa?" and I am quite sure she muttered something about ignorant country bumpkins under her breath. Still I stood there clueless, unable to decipher how knowing about Santa explained anything about the implied Christmas stress. How can buying a toy each, for the children in your house be that stressful? I didn't ask any further questions although I am sure I seriously tarnished the image of my countrymen in my sister-in-law's eyes forever.

Now I can relate to the stress and the shopping mania quite well, but I am still not sure that if that is a good thing.