Christmas is a children's festivalu00a0-- children up to the age of 20 or 25 or so! For parents, Christmas is an ordeal to be survived.

It seems a pity that so much time and energy goes into cooking at Christmas... One's best resources are needed elsewhere, for the extreme emotional demands of the psychodrama that is Christmas. The psychodrama that is Christmas? Well?! But it's true. Christmas is the Festival of the Overfed (by the Overstressed). Clothes, presents, parties, decorations, foodstuffs...

For children, Christmas is Christmas. The festival of joy, of family gatherings and good cheer. As teenagers we would go carol singing, collecting funds for the old (and having fun, ourselves). One or two years, I drove, down Hennur Road at dawn, to cut a branch of casuarina (natural Christmas Tree). (Not possible any longer. It would be environmentally incorrect; and casuarina trees have been replaced by 'developments' all the way to Bagalur.)

Christmas 'family' lunch always included special guests, orphans and lonely old folk, followed by a visit to the Home for The Aged and so on... Quite a satisfactory tale of traditional cheer and virtuous generosity, what?

Well, almostu2026 New Year's Eve used to bring out the devil in us. We were the gang (or one of them) who, after dropping home the girls, silently lifted their flowerpots and lined them up on the walls of other respectable households. The scoundrels who once changed the 'No Parking' signs in Cubbon Park, to 'No Farking' signs.

We also used to drive endlessly around town. Anything to delay the moment when we would have to break up the gang and go home. (My father was baffled: 'I can't understand you children. Turning night into day and day into night.) As we grew older we learnt to reform our ways and, finally, to be indignant about the wildness of modern youth!

Were we really as innocent as we like to remember? When I ask my contemporaries about our wild escapades, they first say, 'Nothing!' But slowly we recall... Taking off people's gates and dropping them in a drain, hanging them on a tree. Lighting midnight firecrackers. And so on...
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"Good clean innocent fun. Not like today," said school friend Dan, echoing many people of half-a-century age and more.

I asked him if that were really true? Give me an example, I said. Dan cited the case of a recent musical concert, an all-girls show, where inebriated males threw bottles and people got hurt. "That's the difference," said Dan.

"We never meant tou00a0 hurt anybody... And we only played jokes on people we knew." Compare that with girls being assaulted on beaches, run down by ruffians in jeeps, for laughs. Some sense of humour that is; and I pray it never takes over Bangalore.

And to conclude, let me repeat the message of a children's concert I attended. 'It's not the just the nice things you do at Christmas that matter, but the Christmas things you do all through the year.'