My Take on Christmass

Dec 30, 2011

My Take on Christmas

                Christmas is always bittersweet for me. I love being together with the family who assemble and long for being 8 years old– old enough to appreciate but too young to have any responsibility. Now I struggle with the logistics and miss being with so many of our far flung family and mostly my brother Parker. I like watching folks enjoy the gift exchange, but have personally never enjoyed giving or getting presents. All of this is only amplified by being so far from home and having children who are “too old” to believe in Santa.

                None the less, it was another great Christmas (why is there only one S?). It’s been great to have Lynn, Delaney’s mom, here as she has been an enthusiastic and flexible traveler (critical attributes in India). After  a few days in Delhi we took the early morning train to Jaipur (which I now think is pronounced j-pur not Jaipur – does anyone out there know for sure?). We wandered the chaotic streets with hawkers (sounds dangerously like hookers when said by Indian tour guides), saw one of the original Playboy Mansions (the Hawa Mahal, I’ll let Delaney and Chase explain why this analogy is so funny … and loaded), had lunch at a restaurant with food as good as  Burkhana “one of the world’s best restaurants” , and walked thru the urban chaos to the Albert hall. I will spare you the photo I took of the crow’s eating a dead rat – but it really epitomizes our family’s approach to embracing all facets of India. 

                The day before Christmass (I’m ignoring Microsoft spell checker and going with the Christ-Mass spelling) was epic. After an India breakfast with way too much fat (the Indians at the restaurant were eating cornflakes, and the hot milk it is served with,  not with a spoon but by scooping it into some roti (unleavened bread). That visiongoes in the record books with the elderly couple in Toyko I saw eating a big mac with a knife and fork.  A long discussion between Delaney and I about priorities, options, budgets and risks set us onto an adventure with a rented car ($30) and a hope (see stuff being made). Like most gamble we take, we won – we saw guys carving wood block printing patterns, a factory where rags turned into beautiful paper products (they fold paper bags by hand – who what goes into those bags from fancy stores), silk screen printing of those ubiquitous cotton bed covers , block printing (where a guy who our limited language interpreted as immodestly referring to himself as an avatar of some Hindu god…  the god of block printing must exist as there are about 300,000 Hindu Gods), and pottery where the combination of rusted old horse shoes and lemon makes a brown solution that turns black upon firing. Our day ended well after dark with a camel ride down the side of a highway but also by a lake with a beautifully illuminated submerged fort. For those of you who have been to a Grateful Dead concert, I’ll add that just when I thought I was peaking, I heard singing from the camel behind us with my two kids and mother in law singing “We three Kings” as the ride ended (by the gas station where we mounted). I went to bed with no bicycles to assemble or batteries to install.

Christmass morning was fun. We awoke by alarm clock thinking the kids (who are very clear that they are too mature to believe in Santa) would sleep in – but only to find they had been awake for hours. After breakfast we met our old friends Shivam and Raj. I remember extoling the virtues of kids to them after dinner in our first Seattle house when we had kids and they didn’t. They now have 3 young kids and bravely were taking a pilgrimage (with two siblings) to India – now I was extoling the virtues of older kids! It was a total blast to hang with them in a family friendly van as we drove to the Ambar palace, rode elephants to the top, toured the palace and returned to their hotel. Passing on a lunch on the grass at the hotel (that was a total throw back to some British Public Television show) we opted for gorging ourselves at the Indian tourist restaurant before catching the train back to Delhi and spending hours on VOIP with family on the east and west coast of North America trying vainly to explain our holiday.

 Since then we have winded down Lynn’s visit with a few days around Delhi, sharing with her Chase’s prowess with the sax, Tessa’s continually dancing body and our new normal in Delhi. I knew Lynn understood our new life when we went to a “famous” restaurant in crowded Old Delhi. It was  down some random alley and called (or described, we never knew) as Pratha Walla Gully. We waited, jostled by the passing traffic on a crowded 12 foot wide alley, for 15 minutes for some of 30 seats  jammed into a 15 by 15 foot space (shared by the “kitchen” some barefoot and cross legged guy fried stuffed bread in pure butter). Lynn did not flinch while two rats ran by and Delaney suffered stoically while the family consumed about 10 pounds of grease.