Christmas was not celebrated in our household before 1989. My ex-husband and I, both Shia Muslims, loved the street decorations. Our son had small parts in the Nativity play and we duly went along to watch and mingle. But most of the trappings of the fest felt intrusive and ersatz.
Some Asian and Arab migrants I knew would try to cook turkey and scatter crackers and silly paper hats around their table. But it was all a bit half-baked and alien.
In 1986, I’d written a feature in the now defunct New Society magazine on Christmas activities in a primary school in Southall in West London, where 80 per cent of the pupils were Hindu, Sikh or Muslim.
The staff assumed that every child did or should celebrate Christmas. So they asked the kids about the trees, pressies, Santa Claus sneaking down the chimney. Some of the little ones lied, others cried because they didn’t have any of that. Parents tried to keep the kids happy and also retain their own ethnic and religious identities.
One Sikh dad, a doctor, told me his children were being “brainwashed” into becoming “Christian and English”. I explained that the staff were just being inclusive, perhaps a little thoughtlessly, but sincerely.
Back then, rigid religious leaders in temples, gurdwaras and mosques warned believers that participating in Christmas rituals would lead us to hell.
Just as punitive were the “tests” put to us by right wingers in politics, the media and the street. If we didn’t have traditional dinners, get drunk, kiss strangers under mistletoe, exchange wrapped gifts or watch the monarch’s speech, we were being disloyal, un-British, subversive.
Those communal values are still contested but are becoming less virulent.
As the decades passed, settlers and their British children laid claim to their multifarious nation and felt a sense of belonging to it. None of that was or is easy.
As the writer Yousra Samir Imran recently wrote in an evocative piece in Hyphen, an online magazine, she and her husband, both British Muslims, “are navigating Christmas with our young child for the first time. Ammar, who is now three, has started singing along to festive songs like ‘Jingle Bells’…
“The Muslim community in Britain is divided into different camps when it comes to the topic of Christmas. [Some] dress up as Santa, put up a Christmas tree and buy their children presents… But there are those who vehemently oppose it… For many traditionalist Muslims, doing anything even remotely Christmassy is forbidden.”
Sikh and Hindu purists also try to stop their flocks joining in the spirituality and fun. They must know it’s a lost cause.
Cultures, thankfully, have no enforceable borders. Humans mix, pick up different ways of seeing and being. In her last years, my mum loved to go listen to carol singers in churches. Many white Brits now fast for Ramadan and join in with Eid celebrations. Diwali, the Hindu annual fest, brings together people of all races and religions.
This Christmas, the turkey and potatoes cooked by many of my kith and kin will be spiced and stuffed with saffron rice; fruit cakes will contain clove powder, pistachios and date molasses; sprouts will be lifted with turmeric and cumin (recipe below), and cheap and cheery gifts will be exchanged. Happy times.
Back to 1989. My ex-husband had left us that January. That December, the white Englishman who became my second husband bought a tree, put wrapped presents under it, and cooked a full yuletide feast. It will never be forgotten. It was magical.
From being a marker of old Britishness, Christmas, for us, became a meaningful signifier of Christian kindness and generosity as well as colourful, diverse modernity.
Loveable Sprouts
Split and parboil 500g of sprouts. Then shallow fry them in olive oil with salt, a tsp of turmeric and half a tsp of ground cumin. Finally throw in three beaten eggs.
The recipe – invented by my mum – redeems the much unloved veg, and redemption, as we know, is a central pillar of Christianity.
