An Immigrant Christmas

I love traditions, old and new, own and adopted. One such tradition is the one we adopted when our kids came of age and wanted a Christmas Tree like all the other kids in their day care! So for the last 10 years we have been putting up a tree and participating in Holiday traditions. Our tree reflects our Immigrant life in America. Rooted in deep Hindu values but branching out to explore new ways of the American Immigrant life. We adorn our tree with richly decorated Indian elephants and camels and birds and with little replicas of violas and pianos that the kids play at their school, photographs , souveniers from family vacations and this year with the Chicago Bears Team Spirit ornaments. ( My son is a huge fan now ).

What's a tree without presents under it. So like every other year, this year we participated in the ritualistic gift exchange. As the years went by, the value of the gifts we exchanged increased. We partied and partook of all the excesses. I was uncomfortable at the dangerous realization that in embracing the new customs we had only picked up the outward consumerism but not captured the underlying meaning of the celebration, expressed in service and charity.

Like every other immigrant family, our emphasis has always been on education and we reserve indulgent treats as rewards for academic excellence. I always second guess myself and wonder if I am ruining a lifelong love of learning by associating incentives with A grades. That is another topic of dicussion. But, only because she won her School's star award , we decided we would surprise our daughter with an I-Pod Nano for Christmas. She on the other hand had been saving her babysitting money and my son his birthday money for buying Christmas presents.

All is fine until the week before Christmas and our spirits are drained when we hear news about my husband's aunt being terminally ill. While we are grappling with the thought of her imminent death and extrapolating that to (and pondering upon ) the mortality of our own aging parents, our distance from them and our inability to take care of them in their hour of need, our kids are unsuspecting , ignorant and immune to our state of minds and happily writing up Christmas Wish lists. Lists of things they desired, coveted and wanted , not what they needed, for everything that they ever needed was already taken care of. You could not blame them , they were just trying to fit in with everyone else making wish lists at school. Except, there was one big difference. While most other kids would be receiving their gifts from many family members and giving them gifts in return, our kids had only 2 possible gift givers, their Mom and Dad , okay 3 if you count my daughter and son buying each other things with their parents money of course. Even though we are feeling depressed and weighed down by the news about Ayamma's deteriorating health which seemed to arrive each day like gifts ( only morbid ones ) from the song "On the twelve days of Christmas" we decide to indulge the kids and take them shopping. As we drive to the mall , I ponder upon the True Love of my life's song, the bird of my calling , french hens, pipe dreams and such.

Now shopping is an excursion that both my husband and I avoid like plague especially during the holidays. It seems like even today, after 2 decades of hard work, making a life for ourselves ( and a comfortable one at that ) we are both unable to buy something for ourselves without a trailing feeling of guilt. In contrast there is my thirteen year old daughter who, at the clutches of peer pressure and guided by the advice from her Teen Vogue magazine pre treats her wish list with an air of entitlement. In her mind, she unquestionably deserves the Juicy Couture socks and the expensive pair of ballet flats that tout huge crystals on the toes. It was obvious that cost of obtaining the full wish list far exceeded the money she had saved up and we had already bought her a present. So we gave her the option to forgo the ballet flats for the promise of a surprise. But she obviouly wanted the cake and eat it too. She started to cry and was so miserable at the thought of losing her flats to a present that her parents were to surprise her with. For how cool could such a present be. After all it was from parents who always reminded their children about how half the world's children go to bed hungry when they left food on their plates at dinner time, who did not believe in brand named anything and always embarked on a lofty lecture before any purchase at any other time of the year. She ranted and raved about how she hated surprises and how she preferred to buy something SHE wanted than be surprised and how the flats had tumbled to the bottom of the "maybe" section of her list from the "must-have" section. And I thought to my disappointed self, where had the essence of gift giving gone? It had perished I suppose in the I-driven world we live in today. How was it a gift to me if I thought of it and I ( forced ) someone to buy it? My husband, being the rational man he is decided that we should reveal the surprise to her and let her decide if she wanted to keep it or trade it for her flats. I was crushed at the thought of being denied the pleasure of gift-giving , robbed of the satisfaction I would get when I saw the gleeful look on her face when she would open the I-pod and stripped of all coolness that I would have earned for giving her such a cool gift.
I could not help but remembering that short story about the " Gift of Magi" that had so touched my heart when I was a kid. I implored my husband to not spoil the surprise but he was dealing with his own hurt and he insisted that she be taught the lesson. Of course when she found out what our surprise she was torn with angst and filled with remorse, she realized she had ruined it for everyone, for herself and her parents. But as saving grace she did decide to keep the I-Pod. Those bejeweled ballet flats would just have to wait , only long enough until the next A was achieved.