The Hindu December Dilemma

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"We let our children take a holiday from school on Diwali and several families get together to have a feast together," Mehta says. "We also make sure we take our children to the temple--they know that Christians celebrate Christmas while they being Hindu have Diwali."

She adds, "I have three children and I have learned that if you share with children they understand a lot. If you don't share, they don't know what to think of it."

In multicultural America today, many Hindu kids no longer feel awkward for not celebrating Christmas; in major urban centers, they're surrounded by Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, and others who do not celebrate the birth of Christ either. It is still difficult for those Hindu children in homogenous smaller towns, but many schools have diversity programs where Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and Diwali are acknowledged.

Hindu parents often take the extra step of distributing sweets and gifts to their children's classmates to introduce them to Diwali. Doing so makes Hindu children feel that their community also has its special moments. And for some, that spirit extends beyond the classroom to the larger world; Mehta says that her children dress up and take sweets to school for Diwali, while she wears a festive sari to work and distributes holiday sweets to her co-workers.

Though many Hindus continue to celebrate Christmas as a secular holiday, the feeling is not universal.

Urmila Shivaram, a New York physician, says that she received a wake-up call when her young daughter asked for a Christmas tree. Soon after, Shivaram started setting up during Navratri and Dusshera the

--a beautiful display of miniature dolls, vehicles, and cooking utensils, which in the South Indian tradition is placed with lights on a decorative step ladder. Like Christmas decorations, these are brought out annually during Navratri and Dusshera.

For the nine nights of Navratri, Shivaram took her daughters to friends' homes for elaborate celebrations where the gombes, each one more decorative than the other, were set up.

"After that, my daughters never asked for a Christmas tree. All our Hindu festivals are fun and the children look forward to them," she says. "My children have never looked for Christmas gifts because they get what they want at Diwali. When they were five or six, they asked for a Christmas tree but I explained to them that it was not our tradition."

At the same time, celebrating Christmas is for some Hindus more than just an exercise in Americanization. As more and more Hindus marry outside their faith, a whole range of interfaith families are being created who join their loved ones at church at Christmas or sit together at a Passover seder and also worship Lakshmi at Diwali. Joined in love and family, they come to believe that all faiths are truly one.

And that sentiment is not isolated to interfaith families. For many Hindus, the all-embracing spirit of the faith captures the essential meaning of the holiday season--that every grain of the universe, Christmas trees and carols and angels included--is all part of the Almighty, the Paramatma.

Many Hindu spiritual leaders believe this, and at the Sadhu Vaswani Center in New Jersey, the congregation participates in a holiday toy drive to give Christmas gifts to the needy. The slogan is, "To Be Happy, Make Others Happy. Join in the spirit of giving and sharing!"

Nowhere, perhaps, is the sense of oneness of all humanity expressed more beautifully than at the Arsha Vidya Gurukulam in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania. Rathi Raja often spends the festive season there and rings in the New Year with bhajans. She says, "In that very Hindu atmosphere, in the prayer hall there is a holiday tree, and the children get gifts on Christmas Day. It's wonderful, and to me this reflects the true Hindu spirit."

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