Calcutta has a taste for Christmas. Like the mince pies that its confectioners make so well, the city blends diverse flavours according to a time-honoured recipe to confect what is locally known as boro-din, the "big days" of the cold season, mellow with creamed butter dollops of winter sunshine, fruity with friendly get-togethers and bitter sweet with nostalgia.
Partly because of its colonial hangover, partly because it was, and to an extent still is, something of a cosmopolitan cultural melting pot, and perhaps partly because it has always espoused traditions not much in favour elsewhere, Calcutta retains a perennial zest for Christmas.
The mainstay of Calcutta's Christmas is the Anglo Indian household, where you can feel the true flavour of the season. Come the first week of December and shopping forays are launched from the back alleys of Wellesley and Eliot Road, Park Lane and Ripon street to buy the ingredients for a festal reunion when aunts and cousins and friends and in-laws will descend from up-country railway colonies-or the more distant environs of Australian or Canadian suburbia-in an annual rite of passage.
Little old ladies in clattering rickshaws converge on the New Market (over 110 years old but still going strong) to haggle with salesmen who sit amidst peaks of dried fruits whose towering summits graphically represent the ascent of soaring prices. Grudging bargains are struck for candied peel and preserved pumpkin, sugared cherries and wrinkled raisins.
Those not fortunate enough to have access to a home-made cake can do fairly well for themselves by getting one from Nahoum's in the New Market considered by many to do the best commercially made, rich fruit cakes in the city. For plum puddings, however, connoisseurs go next door to M.X. D'Gama's or Maxo's as it is popularly known. Provided one can stand the prices, Flury's on Park Street remains unbeatable for mince pies and other seasonal specialties like chocolate cones, Yule logs and nougatines.
Whether making a cake or buying one off the shelf, those in the know do their shopping early. Not only does most Christmas confectionery improve with keeping and the addition of a few judicious tablespoons of rum or brandy, but also advance buying helps one avoid the frantic rush that builds up closer to the big day when the narrow lanes of the Market are clogged with a surging tide of customers determined, in this season at least, to follow the royalist prescription of eating cake in the absence of bread.
With the eclectic gusto that he displays for other exotic items of mental and culinary consumption, the Bengali has made at least this aspect of Christmas as much a part of indigenous tradition as nolen gurer sondesh.
But if cake is the end all of Calcutta's Christmas fare, it is by no means the be all. Even as the mixed fruit is maturing in glass jars on shelves, safely out of the reach of marauding young hands, the meat shops in several of the city's markets are busy preparing salt beef, pickled in brine, lime juice and saltpetre.
Though clubs and the larger restaurants continue to serve the traditional British Christmas dinner of turkey with all the trimmings, a more authentic local alternative is the Anglo-Indian specialty known as haas and baas or duck with bamboo shoots, and poultry shops are loud with the quack and flutter of the birds.
Although available in a variety of commercial establishments, a Calcutta Christmas is best consumed in someone's home. Despite hard times, a number of families, not all of them Christian, keep an open house all day, with guests dropping in to exchange greetings, eat a slice of cake, drink a glass of sweet home-made raisin wine (available in a New Market confectionery in a seasonal indulgence), and swap reminiscences of seasons past and friends remembered, while children scamper, for once un-scolded, around tables crowded with plates and presents.
In keeping with the democratic trend of the vernacularisation of Christianity, in recent times Calcutta has begun to sprout Christmas pandals, miniature look-alikes of the elaborate structures put up during the Pujas. If the Holy Family has thus been co-opted into the popular Hindu pantheon, orthodox Christmas fare has also undergone reincarnation, the better to suit local tastes.
Thus a number of dhabas advertise Christmas, or at least cold weather specialties like paya curry and mataan ishtu. In the last remaining vestiges of the old Chinatown in north Calcutta, Chinese grocers as wizened as their wares purvey such recherché delicacies as dried pork or "ding-ding", sweet preserved olives, and sweet-and-sour sausages tied in bunches with red twine. North Indian restaurants feature special "Xmas" menus that include makke ke roti and sarso ka saag and hot gajar halwa optionally topped with a scoop of vanilla ice-cream.
Apart from selling hot cakes like hot cakes, Bengali establishments do a brisk business in patties. At Christmas, or any other time, Calcutta seldom pretends to be otherwise. The jingle of bells at New Market, the irresistible smell of Nahoum’s cakes, the dance nights at Rangers Club and cosy evenings with family and friends... Kolkatans would give up the world to be here for Christmas.
listen/download some popular Christmas carols.
Joy to the World | Jingle Bells | Silent Night | Holy Night
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