A Christmas Without Walls

Hate for Christmas felt unusually loud this year. It has been growing slowly, silently, like rust on the idea of harmony, and each year it becomes harder to ignore. I was born Christian, now more comfortably agnostic, yet the atmosphere of Christmas has always felt gentle to me. Soft lights, calm nights, a season that asks nothing more than kindness. And I keep thinking about how festivals never used to demand identity checkpoints. As a child, my parents bought crackers for me on Diwali, colours for Holi, and nobody questioned our religion for celebrating joy. When I visited Kerala, I remember non Christian homes hanging bright paper stars simply because it was festive and warm. That was the India many of us grew up loving, an India that borrowed happiness from each other like neighbours sharing salt.

Now it feels like walls are being built faster than we can recognise them. Rabindranath Tagore’s “Chitto Jetha Bhayshunyo” speaks of a world without fear, without narrow domestic walls, but we seem to be walking in the opposite direction, splintering ourselves into labels and suspicion. Faith was once a personal compass, not a weapon, and the God we imagine is always smaller than the human standing next to us if we let hate shrink our hearts. We must remember this, not for religion, not for tradition, but for the basic truth that festivals exist to bring people closer, not to sort them into camps. If we forget that, we lose more than Christmas. We lose the country we promised ourselves we would protect.