Christmas Memories

It’s been a long time since the full family was home for Christmas. And I don’t mean the extended Indian family-even the four of us, the nuclear unit, haven’t been together for Christmas since the elder one went to boarding school seven years ago.

Then the younger one followed her, then came college for one and changing jobs for us. We are now a visiting family. I feel like the one at the railway station waving good-bye to one train and waiting on the platform for the next one to arrive.

All the work that I keep cribbing about-office, home, writing, studying-that is just something to do while I am waiting. This is what I really live for. The precious moments of togetherness-and those are getting so few and far.

Instead of getting all maudlin over the way things of change, let me recall the best memories of Christmas:

•      Jingle Bells! Yes, it wasn't Christmas without the whole school singing Jingle Bells while the plumpest nun came as Santa Clause and gave the whole class the same gift. There was a TV shaped Tin Coin Box I had got one year, which I used forever, one of the plastic legs gave in long ago, but I think that box is still there in my parents’ home.
  
•    Life took a 180 degree turn: Inter-House Music competition at FAPS. The kids used to prepare with the intensity of preparing for the Cricket World Cup. Our house would be ringing with carols all month.
  
•     Playing Santa for years, till the girls caught on and also made their father join. The planning and gift wrapping and the joy of watching people open their presents.
  
•       Christmas celebrations in the apartment. The earnestness of the play practice, dressing up the kids and watching them enact the same story.

I guess that part of life has come full circle.

We haven’t even put up the tree this year. Now we don’t have the enthusiasm and the energy, and they don’t have the time.

But then what will we look back to after a few years?
We’ve got to create some memories to stay with us.

Let me take out the fairy lights.