By Sanjum Sandhu

The Sandhu family celebrating their first Christmas ever.

“It’s the season for sales. I love a good deal!” says my dad, gastroenterologist Bimal Sandhu, after buying 15 pairs of tennis shoes on Black Friday. He will return some shoes, but buying at least 15 shoes is absurd. For my Sikh family, that is how it has always been: the winter holiday season comes around, and we prepare to stock up on home necessities, new clothes, and gifts for our friends and family. 

I never truly understood what Christmas was until late elementary school. I vaguely remember getting excited by the candy canes, hot chocolates, and Santa Claus. I think my naive admiration for a large old white man scared my parents, as I was their first child born in the United States. My older sister Yashnoor never told my parents about how fabulous Santa Claus was or how he had nine reindeer, because she spent the first part of her childhood in India. When my parents moved here, they did not realize how different my formative pre-education years would be from my sister’s. I went to Discovery United Methodist Church for preschool, and when I came home with my first nativity scene coloring page, my parents were mortified. 

The Sandhu family’s Christmas tree in 2012.

Santa Claus and everything related to Christmas slowly lost their importance in my life. We put up a decorated tree every year, and we even used to put artistically wrapped presents under the tree. Along with my little brother Anhad, who is now a freshman at Tucker High School, I would sprint downstairs on Christmas Day, greeted with hot chocolate made by my mother Ramnita. We darted toward the boxes piled up under our average-sized fake Christmas tree, hidden in the corner of our living room, waiting for our older sister to wake up so we could all open gifts together. There was never any talk of Santa Claus; after a point, we all knew my mom spent an absurd amount of time hiding and buying everyone’s presents, including presents for any visitors we had. 

It was never the same as my peers, though. I remember walking back into Shady Grove Elementary School and getting bombarded by friends asking me how Christmas was. For me, “Christmas” was the first 30 minutes after I woke up on Dec. 25, and that was it. We spent the rest of the day doing random little kid shenanigans. We never had a Christmas Eve feast, watched Christmas movies together, or went to church, like many of my peers did. Being the only Sikh in my class for basically my entire life, I could never relate to family gatherings and the supposedly awkward church interactions. Though I had an idea of what Christmas truly was, I paid little attention. 

Sandhu siblings playing Mario Kart after opening presents.

The same goes for my family. We never paid much attention to the spiritual relevance of Christmas. That being said, my family practices a few “traditions” during the holidays. First, we always put up the fake tree. We lug the 11-foot tree down from the attic and decorate it with a vibrant new color scheme each year. Usually, my sister and I do most of the work, with random suggestions from my mother and frequent interruptions from my brother. Sadly, my sister is in her first year of medical school at VCU this year, so she did not have time to set up the tree with me. 

The next tradition we follow is gift-giving, but never from Santa, and sometimes not from another person. That’s right; sometimes, we buy Christmas gifts for ourselves to ensure we are getting what we want (on sale, in true Indian fashion). We sit uncomfortably in a formal living room, watch each other unwrap random gifts, and pretend to be surprised when we know precisely what is in each gift. I have never received Christmas money from relatives across the globe or even my aunt’s family, who live two minutes from us. 

Sandhu family’s fourth Christmas in the U.S.

Christmas has never been recognized outside our family here in the States. On birthdays or holidays like Diwali or New Year’s, we always call our grandparents, aunts, uncles, and an extensive list of cousins to wish them happiness and share blessings. But Christmas is the last holiday we would ever wish for our relatives.

Sandhu family visiting the Golden Temple in Amritsar, India on Christmas.

My parents first realized the magnitude of how Christmas was celebrated when my dad came to the United States to interview in the winter of 2001. It was horrifying for him. He said, “Everywhere you looked, lights were shining in your face, and the smell of peppermint and what smelled like sickeningly sweet ginger lingered everywhere.” The sickeningly sweet ginger smell he referred to was a Christmas classic, gingerbread cookies. 

My family likes to relate Christmas to our religion and customs. In Sikhism, there were ten living Gurus, the first being Guru Nanak Dev Ji. He was a vastly wise man devoted to following God’s wisdom, even when he faced countless adversities. He started spreading his message of appreciation and kindness to people all over India and started this practice in protest of the caste system. To Guru Ji, caste was a social construct meant to create inferiority and power struggles when he knew that God created each human on this planet equally. Regardless of race, gender, or caste, everyone was equal and had the right to be treated equally. A figure like this, of infinite compassion and vast wisdom, appears in almost every religion. They act as our role models, and we seek guidance through their practices. Per Sikh custom, no one in my family cuts their hair, symbolizing how we cherish our God-given blessing of beautiful hair. We also wear a silver metal bracelet on our dominant wrist to remind ourselves to make good decisions. 

Another Sandhu family Christmas spent in India.

But how does this relate to Christmas? Christmas Eve was on a Sunday this year, and my family attends our Gurdwara, a Sikh temple, almost every Sunday. When my dad discovered that Christmas Eve would be on the same day that we prayed, he thought it would be funny to Christmas-ize our preacher. My dad exclaimed, “We should dye Bhaisabh’s beard red and green and have the Ramala Sahib covered in tacky Christmas lights. We could even get Bhaisabh to wear a Santa Claus hat instead of a Paag.” 

Sikh Gurdwara of Richmond. Photo credit: Sikh  Gurdwara Sacvi via facebook.

A quick Punjabi lesson: Bhaisabh is the preacher who leads every prayer and has never cut his hair, so he has an extremely long white beard. The Ramala Sahib is an ornately designed garment that protects our holy scripture. A Paag is the turban you see many Sikh men wear. My whole family laughed because this idea seemed so absurd. Still, being in a country where your customs are practically unknown, it is comforting to find the humor in seemingly ordinary American traditions and how they could fall in line with ours.

Another example of my family’s incorporation of Sikhism into our Christmas experience was when my older sister experienced her first Christmas. I cannot even begin to imagine how disorienting it was for my sister to move

Anhad and Sanjum Sandhu wearing Indian clothes on Christmas.

from a different country at the ripe age of four. She willed her way through it, yet her transition was not seamless. As she remembers her first and a few following Christmases, she was slightly confused about what the holiday meant. So, for the first part of her and my Christmas life, she convinced me that our religion actually celebrated Christmas. She would tell me, “Sanjum, did you know that Santa Claus is actually Guru Nanak Dev Ji, disguised in fat man clothes, to teach us the importance that even though someone does not look a certain way, they can still have a massive impact on our world?” 

The Sandhu family’s Christmas tree this year.

This notion quickly died out, and my parents were horrified by my sister’s absurd proposition. In the end, our halfway accurate idea of Christmas made the best method of practicing the holiday for my family. We were the first out of our extended family to move out of India to a Western country, with almost nothing but my dad’s passion for work and research. My parents have told me numerous stories of all the fears they had about moving to this country and the possibility that their children would be brainwashed with Western customs rather than our traditional Sikh customs. But we learned and adapted our lifestyles to find the perfect balance. We no longer think that Santa Claus is secretly disguised as one of the most prominent men in Sikhism, but we are glad that Guru Ji’s guidance has allowed us to accept another faith’s traditions while remembering where we came from.

All photos by Bimaljit Sandhu except where noted.