Christmas in India?

When living in a country where 80 percent of the people are Hindu and 13 percent are Muslim, you wouldn't expect there to be much Christmas spirit. Surprisingly, that's not the case. While there are a small amount of Christians out here, there aren't nearly enough to explain why I hear Christmas songs over the mall loudspeakers, why I see shopkeepers giving out candy canes, why numerous children and adults come rapping at my car window to (attempt to) sell me a santa hat. A few businesses decorate their buildings with lights, some that flicker so inconsistently that it just looks like they forgot to pay the electric bill.

I guess they just enjoy the flavor of Christmas, the general merriment. You don't need to religiously celebrate a holiday to enjoy the atmosphere it brings.

At my day job out here, they did much more celebrating than they ever did back in the states. In Burbank, our secret Santa gift exchange was voluntary (and I lacked the school spirit to ever volunteer), here it was practically forced. I ended up receiving a progression of small gifts on the days leading up to the "big" gift day: a candy bar, a Pepsi, a t-shirt.

Then on Thursday comes the main event. I'm working at my desk when I see a co-worker with a guitar leading a small procession of other co-workers down the aisle, singing Jingle Bells. Everyone (maybe 80 people) stops working and gathers around as an Indian Santa Claus appears, eager to distribute the secret Santa gifts to all of us good employees. I'm the second person to get his gift -- some heavy, oddly-shaped, lumpy thing wrapped in newspaper -- but I refrain from opening it until all gifts have been distributed. And there are a lot of gifts so I end up waiting a long time. Finally Santa finishes and I can open my gift. I rip through the newspaper and find a big bunch of bananas, an orange and an apple. Apparently this was a joke gift (Oh, that zany Rizvanulla, my secret Santa). The t-shirt had been the real one. And it actually was a very nice t-shirt.

I don't even eat bananas. So I gave them out to a couple friends and whoever happened to walked by. "Hey, happy hoildays," I'd say. "Have a banana." Nothing says happy holidays like a banana.

Etiquette dictates that, even though it's very unlikely they actually celebrate Christmas, I should get gifts for my driver and the guys that come in and clean my room/apartment every day (it's actually called a service apartment -- it's pretty comparable to a hotel room). It's tough deciding what I should get them. I don't want to buy them gifts that are too fancy -- or gifts that aren't fancy enough. And just giving them money isn't really an option (at least from my perspective) since I already give them a healthy tip once a week anyway. Then it hits me -- I'll give them chocolate.

Everyone here seems to love chocolate. In fact, just prior to leaving the states, I was given the hot tip that I should bring lots of chocolate with me to distribute among my co-workers, who I had been led to believe were raving chocolate fiends. They do sell chocolate here, but much of it is prohibitively expensive for the average Bangalorian. That's why my suitcase was heavy with countless bags of Hershey's kisses and miniatures when my plane first touched down.

But back to the driver and apartment cleaners... I figured I'd get two nice expensive chocolate tins for my driver and one nice tin each for the two apartment guys. But I had to be careful with their gifts. From what I'd been told, one person makes the bed, washes the dishes and does general tidying-up stuff. And the other person -- who is from the untouchable class -- only cleans the bathroom. I'm not entirely sure how accurate that is since I've never been home when they clean (like a good hotel guest, I immediately put the "do not disturb" sign to use as soon as I walk in the door). Regardless, I remember hearing on NPR that if you're in a gift-giving situation such as this, you cannot give the person of lower class a gift of equal value to the the person of a higher class. Of course I do not agree with this way of thinking, but I don't want to cause problems either.

So I end up buying two nice tins of chocolate-covered hazelnuts and two fancy boxes of Toblerones. They were very expensive by Bangalore standards. I'll give one of each to my driver and I'll leave the other two on the kitchen counter for the cleaning guys. The way I figure it, they can each take one based on whichever has more perceived value. I hope I did all this the right way -- I hope I bought the right "level" of gift. It's hard to figure out. I wish there was a guidebook for this sorta thing.