SO THIS IS CHRISTMAS (IN GOA)

The traditional celebrations in the old vaddos of Goa are all about feasting, faith and time well spent with friends and family.

- Vivek Menezes

Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam-the ancient Vedic phrase meaning "the world is one family"-fits very well for Christmas in Goa. The widely scattered diaspora of India's smallest state gathers back home in substantial numbers, Antipodean, British, North American, Lusophone and very desi accents chorusing together around family dinner tables. The village bylanes turn magical, with hand-made stars and fairy lights, and streams of excited children waiting expectantly for Santa Claus to arrive. You will hear guitars, and laughter, and carolling in Konkani, Portuguese and English. From each kitchen, there's an unstoppable stream of traditional delicacies that once again carry the traces and influences of trade routes reaching all across the world.

"Goa's Christmas sweets had a global touch much before the age of globalisation," says the fine Panjim-based historian Fatima da Silva Gracias, in her landmark Cozinha de Goa: History and Tradition of Goan Food. She describes how the seasonal array "draws from diverse culturesPortuguese, Hindu, Arabic, Malaysian and Brazilian". Other specialities have their roots in the Konkan itself, which "has its own influence in the form of neureos (sweety flaky pastry), kulkuls (a sweet rava and coconut milk sweet) and shankarpali (crisp flour and sugar bites)". Similarly wide-angled diversity also characterises the traditional family festival meal, which can include the famous sorpotel-born from the 16th and 17th-century African slave trade that connected Goa to Bahia in Brazil via Angola and Mozambique-that is made "tail to snout" from every part of the pig, famously including blood, and South East Asian-inflected bebinca (the version in Indonesia and the Philippines has the same name but spelled bibingka), along with lots fruit cake of Raj-era Anglo-Indian soaked in rum.