Tinsel town

Christmas is in the air!!! And I just CANNOT believe that some of us cannot feel it :(

It all starts at the beginning of December when you walk in to a super market and find it adorned from the ceiling to the floor with tinsel, Christmas offers and the like.Fake snow fashioned out of cotton wool and what-not rests on windowsills and counters,red and white glistens everywhere.Bowls of cherries,cashews,plums and all the essential ingredients that make up a Christmas cake sit smugly on tables,covered in cling film.This for me,is Christmas in multicolored bowls.

There's just something about tinsel that travels way back in to my childhood.There's just something more to it than a mere fascination of a child towards everything that glistens.Tinsel has always fascinated me,it still continues to do so.It never fails to drag me back to a childhood of Christmas trees waiting to get decorated,cardboard boxes full of Christmas decorations,yards and yards of colorful tinsel,Christmas cakes,mince pies and other Christmas delicacies.

Cannot escape from commenting about those cardboard boxes full of cherished Christmas decorations.These boxes were considered to be treasure troves,only to be taken out once a year.It's contents never failed to fascinate us,no matter how many Christmases we have seen them,felt them and hung them on trees.And there was a particular smell that wafted up the nose once you opened up that box too.This smell,I had identified as one of the first smells of Christmas as a child.

Every year(it became almost a tradition)we were allowed to add one new decoration to the tree.Mother only lets us buy one each year,so the choosing of this particular object has to be done carefully.It has always been very difficult for me to choose between the many shiny balls,tinsel,colorful angels and the like.I remember getting lost among all the shiny things, completely taken in and bedazzled by it all.I always went for angels every year where as my brother always chose bells and balls.If it was up to me alone,the whole tree would be swathed with angels and nothing else.

Another thing I liked about Christmas were the Christmas movies that are broadcast on the television during the Christmas days.I used to watch the same Christmas movies year after year over and over again but still look forward to watching them again the following year as well with the same enthusiasm that I had in watching it for the first time.I used to complain that we didn't have a chimney for Santa Claus to climb down from.To compromise that,I used to hang socks on our gas oven,wake up on the Christmas morning,overjoyed to find a few chocolates and toffees in them courtesy of Daddy Dearest of course.I knew it was him.But somehow,I wanted to believe that Santa Claus has not forgotten me that year.

I have been a very lucky child indeed to be able to enjoy a vast diversity of cultures from my very childhood.The fact that my parents are devout Buddhists did not stop them from letting us enjoy the joys of Christmas and the like,even festivals like Diwali,Thaipongal were celebrated to a certain extent at our household(probably due to the fact that we always had Tamil kitchen maids).But Christmas in particular is a memory that I have cherished so lovingly in my mind.Its a holiday that I've always looked forward to,with my mother cooking various goodies in the kitchen for me and my brother,the smells of cooking and baking wafting from the kitchen,Christmas carols,Christmas parties and the rest of the hullabaloo surrounding Christmas.

Christmas has changed from what I used to remember though.My mother no longer has the time to cook and bake for us anymore.And we no longer have a Christmas tree at home.Seems we have eventually grown out of the tree decorating rituals.It has been one of those many other things that I have lost in the sands of time.I no longer know where that treasure trove of Christmas decorations are.I miss the tinsel,the shiny balls and strings of bells.And despite the fact that we are Buddhists, we used to get invited to a lot of Christmas parties those days.And the real deal too,with carol singing,Christmas goodies and the like but not anymore.Most of those people have left the country now and we too do not have the time to go to the ones that we get invited to.A lot has changed but the Christmas spirit still remains the same.I can feel it in the air,that mesmerizing warmth,that festive feeling in the ambiance,the air charged with excitement and something else that I cannot quite explain.You can just feel it everywhere,it has a way of enveloping you in its incredible warmth and lifting you off the ground,intoxicating you in a way that renders you quite senseless and leaves you starry eyed(The Darling experienced one of my "Its Christmas!I can feel Christmas!!I need to dance now!!"moods just recently and was quite convinced that I had gone mad).That's how intoxicated I get when I feel it in the air.I miss the smell of baking wafting out of the kitchen this time though.Maybe I will bake a Christmas cake this year,just to get that good ol Christmas spirit back and to send that smell of Christmas baking spreading it's magic through out the household.

Sigh............Christmas.......It always has me grinning from ear to ear like an idiot :))))