December is here –– the last month of the year, according to the Gregorian calendar, bringing to an end a twelve-month cycle and, for many, the rituals associated with the cultural festivals and religious holidays that happen this time of the year.

After living in India for a few years, and as our children grow up, December has become a high point for our family: the culmination, after a string of festivals that starts, every year, with the Ganesh Chaturti festival in August or September, and continues with Eid al-Fitr and Navarathri in September or October, and the joyously noisy celebrations of Diwali in October or November (The actual dates for these celebrations are determined by the lunar calendar and vary slightly from year to year).

As soon as the last of our small supply of fire crackers was burned, a few weeks back, my 9-year-old daughter sighed happily, and said: “And now, Christmas.” “Yeah, Christmas!” cried her little sister.

Yes, Christmas is in the air already…

Yesterday, both girls were finally allowed to break open the Advent calendar that their grandparents sent them last year (the package was sent in November, but it reached us only by the end of January). They’ve started clamoring for us to get the Christmas tree and decorations out of the closet. Soon, Harry Belafonte’s CDs will be coming out of their cases and his velvety voice will fill our house with Christmas songs as we start hanging lights on the tree, and sticking cheerful Santas on our glass windows. Together we will trim the tree and prepare the Nativity scene with the little santons (figurines) and the special white-spotted brown paper that we use to create the illusion of a star-filled barn. My parents bought them for us one year, and kept them carefully until we could bring them back to India in our suitcases the following summer. It’s hard to find these items in July or August, when we normally visit them!

Last year, as we built our Nativity scene on the large bottom plank of our Rajasthani bookshelf, a little wooden Ganesh and a small brass Buddha found their way close to the empty spot waiting for Jesus to be born. I don’t remember how they got there, but there they sat, round and happy, amidst all the cotton wool meant to represent the snow. Both my children have grown up surrounded by images of Ganesha, the Remover of Obstacles with his broken tusk, his pot belly, and his friend the mouse. They’ve seen his statues carried on auto-rickshaws and trucks all across the city, and they’ve seen them immersed in the lake. Similarly, we have several statues of Buddha in our home. When our little one was 17 months old, we visited Sri Lanka, and she saw so many Buddhas over there that the word became one of her favorites for a while. She would see the statue of a politician, or of any God from the Hindu pantheon, and cry enthusiastically: “Buddha!” So it was only natural that both Ganesh and Buddha should join us in awaiting the birth of Jesus. What is the spirit of Christmas, after all, if not a spirit of universal love? And shouldn’t love go hand in hand with inclusion, tolerance and respect?

When my husband lived in Mali, a predominantly Muslim country , he picked up the habit of saying “Insh’Allah” (God willing) whenever the outcome of a situation was uncertain.  When I met him in New York, he was still saying it. He continued to do so while we lived in the predominantly Christian south-eastern part of Nigeria, and our coming to India has not changed his habit. Some people assume he’s Muslim (he was brought up Christian); others know that he’s not, and smile. One day, the Hindu driver who worked for my husband’s office blurted out “Insh’Allah” as the two of them discussed their concern about a particular situation. When my husband laughed, and called him on it, he just smiled.

A friend of mine who grew up in India in a Christian family, once told me that her American mother always baked hundreds of cookies at Christmas so she could offer them to all their friends and neighbors, most of them Muslims, who’d visit to pay their respects on this important Christian holiday. The same friends they themselves had visited several weeks before to pay their respects, on the occasion of Eid’ and the end of Ramadan.

I love these anecdotes because they demonstrate how we can hold different beliefs and still live together in harmony.

My nine-year-old child has recently started asking me questions about our religion. I tell her that I was brought up a Catholic, but as I have distanced myself from all the Christian dogmas, she was not baptized. I never question that decision. It was dictated by a strong belief that, to this day, I continue to hold. And yet, I sometimes wonder if we didn’t make things more difficult for her by not providing a frame: one that she can choose to lean on, or rebel against. Time will tell. In the meantime, I continue to talk to my children about the many religions around the world, and how lucky they are to have already been exposed to so many faiths.  At such a young age, they already know the importance of observing the diverse rituals attached to each sacred place, such as the taking off of shoes and the covering of heads. I tell them about the beauty of connecting with the Higher Power or Energy that each of us carries inside. I tell them that God comes with different names according to those who worship Him or Her, and that many people worship more than one god. And that regardless of which sky people are under, what language is spoken around them, and the skin color of those who perform their sacred rituals, God always means love, and love means, among other things, inclusion, tolerance, and respect.

As 2009 comes to an end, and we prepare to celebrate the entrance into a new year, I find myself making a wish: that, in a spirit of inclusion, tolerance, and respect, more and more children be offered the opportunity to learn about the world’s many religions, so they, too, can learn to respect those who hold beliefs different than their own. Could this be a New Year’s resolution?

Posted December 2009