Christmas is nearly upon us and there are just a couple of days left before I can rip off wrapping paper to reveal the car keys, MacBook, Chanel goodies and other fabulous presents my family would get me in an ideal world. You become disillusioned with festivals as you grow older, dismissing them as over-hyped and driven by retail companies mercilessly exploiting consumers. I miss being younger and looking forward to brandishing sparklers at Diwali, or celebrating Holi, where all the neighbourhood kids ran about with water pistols and balloons filled with dyed water to throw at each other and passing cars. Now we know those dyes are carcinogenic. Reality puts a damper on everything.
Christmas used to be a fantastic time of the year. We read aloud ’Twas the Night Before Christmas from a beautifully illustrated hardback with its pictures of sleeping mice curled in a holly-wreathed hole. My friend Aroushi’s mum would take us to Wafi City Mall, where there was an elaborate Santa’s grotto with a snowed-upon roof that I found unbelievably romantic. After waiting in a queue for ages, you’d get the extraordinary treat of meeting Santa and receiving either a pink or purple dragon plushie – your day was made if you bagged the pink one.
While nothing matches the magic of childhood, Yuletide at university is an enjoyable experience. There is the slight glitch of all the students heading back home in December for their holidays, which means there’s no one left at college. Students will find any excuse to party, and Christmas is a pretty valid one, so the conundrum was impossible to overlook. Never mind, we say – we’ll celebrate it a month early. The last week of term is therefore traditionally “Bridgemas”, an abbreviation of Cambridge Christmas, conceived in a moment of genius.
The carollers lustily belt Good King Wenceslas in the Market Square and Marks & Spencer’s aisles smell of cinnamon and ginger cookies. We have a Secret Santa scheme in college, where each of us is appointed as Santa for another student (the “child”). The Santa secretly slips a present in his child’s pigeonhole in the mailroom – so we all get to be the Santa as well as a child.
I went for the minimum-fuss route, unimaginatively getting my child a discounted box of chocolates. My Santa was considerably more creative. My pigeonhole housed a lovely surprise: a neatly wrapped woolly beanie from H&M, a bar of Green & Black’s sea salt chocolate and a thoughtful, handwritten letter saying they hoped a warm hat would be useful for English weather in January after I returned from hotter climes. I got pretty sentimental over receiving a genuine handwritten letter and the fact my Santa made an effort to find out where I lived.
I’m feeling much less cynical after Bridgemas. All you need is to surround yourself with good friends, good cheer and a really excellent slab of Green & Black’s.
Salt chunks in chocolate – who knew?
The writer is an 18-year-old student at Cambridge who grew up in Dubai