Describe the rituals of Christmas and gurupurb
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Christmas comes but once a year. But it takes over our lives, along with our budgets and credit ratings, even though, like many Americans, I am not even a nominal Christian.
Christmas is a bonanza for retailers and sales outlets. People go into debt to buy what they neither need, nor want, nor can afford.
The day after Christmas, the fever breaks. Shoppers line up hours before stores open, to return the gifts that they neither needed, nor wanted, nor could afford.
This Christmas virus sees not that one may be a devout deist, while the other is a committed agnostic or atheist. It makes no distinction between an observant Christian and Muslim, Hindu, Jew or Sikh.
In the Indian lunar calendar, the birthday - gurpurab (literally, day of the Guru) - of the tenth Sikh Master, Guru Gobind Singh, falls close to Christmas. That allows us to merge Sikh celebration with Christmas and its practices - dinners, lighting of houses, and exchange of presents. We can then practice our own tradition without standing out as a sore thumb.
In not so good a pun, Bill Kilner suggested that if Christmas combined with Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, the resulting holiday could be renamed "Yule be sorry."
In days gone by, wearing a red turban, I, too, have, at times, filled in for Santa Claus at children's parties; my friends and I quipped that I was a younger, trimmer version.
Some thirty years ago, when a celebration of Christmas surrounded us, my not quite three-year-old daughter wanted a Christmas tree. Our dilemma was how best to join in the overwhelming celebration while enmeshing Sikh heritage in it, but without diminishing either tradition.
Christmas is a bonanza for retailers and sales outlets. People go into debt to buy what they neither need, nor want, nor can afford.
The day after Christmas, the fever breaks. Shoppers line up hours before stores open, to return the gifts that they neither needed, nor wanted, nor could afford.
This Christmas virus sees not that one may be a devout deist, while the other is a committed agnostic or atheist. It makes no distinction between an observant Christian and Muslim, Hindu, Jew or Sikh.
In the Indian lunar calendar, the birthday - gurpurab (literally, day of the Guru) - of the tenth Sikh Master, Guru Gobind Singh, falls close to Christmas. That allows us to merge Sikh celebration with Christmas and its practices - dinners, lighting of houses, and exchange of presents. We can then practice our own tradition without standing out as a sore thumb.
In not so good a pun, Bill Kilner suggested that if Christmas combined with Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, the resulting holiday could be renamed "Yule be sorry."
In days gone by, wearing a red turban, I, too, have, at times, filled in for Santa Claus at children's parties; my friends and I quipped that I was a younger, trimmer version.
Some thirty years ago, when a celebration of Christmas surrounded us, my not quite three-year-old daughter wanted a Christmas tree. Our dilemma was how best to join in the overwhelming celebration while enmeshing Sikh heritage in it, but without diminishing either tradition.
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