Christmas at the Guptas
By Ritija Gupta

There was a gingerbread house on the counter, and the smell lingered through the small kitchen. My parents, tall as trees, wandered around the house busying themselves with holiday obligations—tinsel here, fake candles there, ubiquitous portly Santas and other baubles overwhelming our normally tasteful home in an attempt to get in the holiday spirit. Cabinets opened and closed—cinnamon on this shelf, Lord Krishna on another. We kept our Gods and spices next to each other in the cabinets, while old Indian art shared the walls with tinsel and banners proclaiming the holiday. When it came to expressions of Americana in my childhood, my immigrant parents were amateurs. So, they overcompensated so as to make their only child, a girl who wanted nothing more than to fit into her new country, blend in the way a bad transvestite interprets femininity.

My parents, who were still very new to the idea of an American Christmas, were somewhat overwhelmed by the amount of preparation involved. While the tree was up, a few branches were still visible which indicated a major oversight in the decorative process. While there was a gingerbread house on the counter, the frosting had not yet been completely piped on, and the gumdrops sat lonely on the counter, waiting to be turned into shingles, windows, and doors. My father tried to negotiate what to do when attempting to hang stockings by the chimney with care in the absence of a chimney, while my mother attempted to figure out the concept of figgy pudding and whether it was worth it to whip up a batch for a family of three that would really rather have kulfi, gulab jamun, or rasmallai.

I, a six year old, was put to work immediately to assist in this holiday melee. It was deemed that my tiny fingers would be most useful in untangling approximately 50 yards of Christmas lights, and so I attacked my task with zest. With my parents' time occupied with trying to understand other holiday traditions (my parents long debated the presence of a dancing Santa—my father loved it, but it terrified me) I sat by myself listening to a Christmas medley, dreaming of a My Little Pony stable and examining the strands of glossy lights.

Dark emeralds, rubies, and sapphire blues gleamed in my hands like hard candies. My natural curiosity and infamous penchant for sweets got the better of me and I indulged my fantasy—was it at all possible that instead of untangling lights, my parents had indeed given me a Christmas surprise of 50 yards of hard candies on a string? It was too much to bear, and I commenced sucking on the lights to find out. A red one I expected to taste like cherries yielded nothing but plastic. Blue, I thought, might be raspberry, green perhaps sour apple, yellow would be lemon of course—nothing. However, each disappointment was conquered by my childhood idealism and the belief that if I kept at it, I would eventually find candy—I was convinced that something so beautiful had to be delicious as my senses of sight and taste were somehow inextricably linked at that age.

I managed to suck the color off of six lights before one of my parents (I can't remember which —their screams sounded identical to me) enveloped me in arms like a pair of wings and raptured me over to the sink where I was immediately ordered to spit. The sounds of Irving Berlin's "White Christmas" were replaced by arguing in Hindi over what to do with a little girl who had been sucking on light bulbs for a good 20 minutes. Spitting seemed the obvious answer, but it couldn't be enough, could it? Calls were made to relatives, doctors, relatives who were doctors—will she be poisoned? Will she have brain damage? Do we induce vomiting? How do you do that? Can we still use the lights? All the while, I stood on a chair, wide-eyed, spitting into the sink, confused as to what I'd done wrong. We'd done everything right —the food, the decorations, the lights, the music—and somehow I ended up spending Christmas Eve doing shots of milk while spitting in the sink. Meanwhile, the dancing Santa stood across the room on the dining room table, dancing his mocking, knock-kneed jig.

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Ritija Gupta finally considers herself a writer, which feels pretty good, and would like to give a shout out to her mom. She is currently auditioning understudies for her life, age/gender/race unimportant.

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