Skip to main content

Telling A Story

The neighborhood I have lived the last four year boasts of some pretty tacky Christmas decorations. While they can be an eye-sore specially past the end of January, they do help spread holiday cheer this time of year. The lights remind of Diwali at home which is likewise often garishly over the top.

This year things are rather subdued. Lots of homes have no lights at all. A wreath on the door is about all they have for the holidays. Maybe it is a sign of the times - the parking lot at work was pretty full the week of Christmas and those at work acted like it was business as usual. This is a lot different from what I have seen in the past. Attendance starts to thin in the second half of December and by the week of Christmas almost no one is around. The few stragglers that do come in are elsewhere in their minds.


J has not asked for a Christmas tree this year either. Thanks to some ethnic diversity in her class lately, she has figured out that everyone does not celebrate Christmas and therefore does not have to have a tree in their home. The presents, cookies and candies are definitely very desirable and she would not mind them at all. Christmas has turned secular and in the process more accessible to her and I am glad for it.

Before she returns to school after winter-break and all the kids compare notes on who got what for Christmas, I wanted to leave J with some food for thought so she can cope with not having a laundry list of stuff she can talk about. I told her the story of The Gift of the Magi one night at bedtime - what better way to reinforce the theme of love and sacrifice without which the act of giving and receiving gifts is entirely meaningless. I hope it will stand J in good stead.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...