Growing up in Calcutta, Christmas was always a magical time of the year for me. It wasn't just that I went to a convent school or that I had Christian friends who would celebrate this day as a religious festival. It was also because Christmas - or Burra Din, as we called it in Cal - had been transformed into a secular holiday by the denizens of the city, who treated it as a special occasion to be marked by fireworks, streetlights, neighborhood parties, and community picnics, in which everyone would wear silly hats, eat, drink and make very merry indeed. Strangely enough, there was never any tradition of Christmas presents - or, at least, not in my family.
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