So This is Christmas

“What do you want for Christmas?”, my sister glumly asked me recently.

“Oh, I’m not sure.  I don’t really need anything”, I replied, hoping she would glean that I wanted a renewal of my subscription to The Paris Review or a blue Lululemon running singlet. 

Our taste for gifts has become more extravagant but, when we were growing up, my sister and I didn’t have pocket money so we gave each other presents we dug up from the garden or found in the back of cupboards.  One year, Lynn found a ripped up bird magazine jammed in my parents’ bookcase.  I didn’t care that it was missing its cover and half its pages.  I spent days marvelling at illustrations of ‘Birds of the seacoasts’. I exclaimed delightedly over the double page spread on eggs and studied the instructions on how to build a birdhouse.  

Another year, Lynn cut out pictures from catalogues and glued them onto an old cardboard box for me.  Flimsy as it was, I stored my birthday cards and correspondence from my American pen-pal in my box of ‘Treasures’.

This year, we’ll open our more upmarket presents at my cousin’s house, bathed in the twinkling blue lights of a resplendent Christmas tree.  All our relatives will arrive punctually (as Asians do) and ring the doorbell with arms laden with food and empty stomachs.  After perfunctory pleasantries, during which we ‘kids’ subject ourselves to avuncular ruffling of hair, the eating begins in earnest. 

Mountains of rice will be scooped onto plastic plates and handed around like sandbags passed down a line of rescue workers toward the riverbank.  We’ll stir pots of chicken curry and rescue drowning drumsticks from thick sauce topped with a layer of crimson oil.  Aunties will stab chopsticks into towers of rice noodles with shredded carrot, shitake mushrooms and mystery meat. Spring rolls will lurch dangerously across our plates as we reach for slabs of roast pork and duck.  Nimble fingers will prise open cans of Yeo’s chrysanthemum tea and green bottles of aloe vera juice. 

When the food frenzy has subsided, we will soothe our chilli-burnt tongues with the silky caress of mango pudding and jiggling cubes of lychee jelly.

Over the years, our family Christmas celebrations have grown less meagre.  Nevertheless, I’ll take a moment on Christmas Day to remember two little girls who, although disappointed that their parents couldn’t afford a Christmas tree, created their fairytale Christmas by building a miniature tree from second-hand Duplo blocks.