“Long before I understood the words, I knew its feeling—that quiet turning of the year, the sound of something ending and beginning again.”
By Saachi D’Souza
Growing up in the dominantly Hindu state of Gujarat, Christmas was more than gifts, family, and cheer. We found ways, albeit small, to bring us back to what was forced into suppression. Like most Catholic kids, I too took piano lessons. The one song that stuck with me was Auld Lang Syne. Every year, between the last carol and the first toast, the familiar melody begins. It isn’t, strictly speaking, a Christmas song. There is no Bethlehem, no manger, no snow. But Auld Lang Syne always arrives, as if called by the hush that settles over the world in late December.
“Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind?”
Listen to a 1910 recording of Auld Lang Syne.
That small, private moment says something about what Christmas poetry has always done. To understand this, we can look back: long before it became a shopping-season jingle, Christmas was a poetic time. Language was used to linger on endings and beginnings, on loss and renewal.
The earliest Christians did not celebrate Christmas at all. The festival only became an official holy day in 336 CE, under Emperor Constantine (Maria Frahm-Arp, The Weird, Wonderful and Often Unholy History of Christmases). Yet by the Middle Ages, poetry and faith had become inseparable. Across Europe, the “twelve days of frivolity” filled streets with caroles: songs sung by ordinary people, joined with dance and drink. The French carole was at once hymn and celebration, a rhythm of devotion that belonged as much to taverns as to cathedrals.
From that European tradition of caroling came the lyricism of Christina Rossetti, whose In the Bleak Midwinter (1872) still defines the season’s inward stillness:
“In the bleak mid-winter, frosty wind made moan, / Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone.”
and later,
“Yet what I can, I give Him — give my heart.”
A prayer and a poem at once.
By 1823, Clement Clarke Moore’s A Visit from St. Nicholas (“’Twas the night before Christmas…”) had turned the sacred into the familiar: angels gave way to chimneys, miracles to stockings and reindeer. The mystery of faith became the comfort of home.
Everywhere, the season found new tongues. In colonial Bengal, Christian poets rewrote the Nativity in vernacular rhythm. One of the earliest Christo geeti (1788) sings:
“Jonomilo Jishu punyo sishu / Here comes Jesus, the Holy Child.”
- Prasenjit Dasgupta, In the Name of Holy Father, Son & Music
Another carol prays:
“Hey babā Jesus, balok nirmāl, / Bibi Maria-r udorer siddhi dhārma fol / Amār dayār Jesus… Hey sonār babā, tomake ami loi.”
(O Father Jesus, the chaste heart! Heavenly blessed thy Maria’s womb.)
Sung to the cadence of Bāul and Kirtān, these songs in India remind us that Christmas poetry was never only about snow. Rather, in India, the divine entered the village melody.
Centuries later, Derek Walcott in the Caribbean would echo similar hybridity. “The light of the world is still the light of the world.” In South Africa, poets wrote of migrant families returning home, “new clothes the highlight of Christmas.” And across India, the holiday became a matter of food, kinship, and sound rather than winter solitude.
For me, Auld Lang Syne is the hinge between these worlds: Scottish winter and Indian coast, farewell and return. Robert Burns wrote:
“We twa hae run about the braes / And pou’d the gowans fine; / But we’ve wander’d mony a weary fit, / Sin’ auld lang syne.”
In Gujarat, Christmas was never just ours. In a place where every faith felt a claim over the celebration, all you needed was a tree to belong. We didn’t have the money or glamour of the rich Gujarati families - no elaborate lights, no imported ornaments —but we had music, and we had carols, and my mother’s plum cake. Music was our celebration, our prayer, our brief return to who we were meant to be.
Long before I understood the words, I knew its feeling—that quiet turning of the year, the sound of something ending and beginning again. For us, it wasn’t about nostalgia for another place, but the small ache of remembering where we came from, even in a place that didn’t always make room for it.
To understand the Indian Christmas imagination is to understand adaptation. In My Memories of Christmas (from Tinsel Tales: Essays and Stories on Christmas, ed. Jerry Pinto & Naresh Fernandes), Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar recalls his Santhal childhood in Jharkhand:
“Christmas Day in our school was celebrated about a week before 25 December so that the school could be closed for our Christmas-cum-winter holidays by the 25th. We were told to come to school wearing what our teachers called ‘colour dress’.”
He remembers being mistaken for Christian, asking his father, “‘Are we Christians?’ My father decided to play along… ‘Tell them we’re from the Chhota church.’”
Through humour and tenderness, he shows how Christmas in India became less about creed and more about belonging. From Jharkhand to Goa to Kerala, it is part borrowed, part indigenous: equal parts pitha, cake, star lantern, and choir.
Christmas poetry in India is an archive of translation. Christo Bāul singers mixed Vaishnava longing with Christian song; Goan poets wrote of bebinca and midnight mass; Adivasi storytellers placed angels in forests and mines. Each carries the same ache Burns voiced: “For auld lang syne, my dear, / We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet.”
The history of Christmas poetry is also a history of power. By 432 CE, it was customary across the Roman Empire (Frahm-Arp). Over time, its tone changed. In 1822, Clement Clarke Moore gave Santa a sleigh. In 1843, Charles Dickens gave him a conscience. In the twentieth century, T. S. Eliot opened Journey of the Magi with weariness: “A cold coming we had of it.” W. H. Auden asked in For the Time Being: “What is the meaning of this season if we are still alone?”
Christmas poems are rarely about miracles now; they are about memory. The attempt to locate ourselves in time.
Everywhere, Christmas songs carry the memory of migration — the ache of finding home far from where one began. In coastal India, that memory lives in music: Konkani carols by the sea, harmoniums blending Portuguese hymns with Indian rhythm.
In Kerala, old community songs still echo this longing. They speak of journeys, homecomings, and faith that travels on salt air. One refrain says, “The hope we have had since ancient times has not faded from our hearts.” (Shiji Mariam Varghese and Avishek Parui) The words could belong to anyone who has known displacement - the migrant worker, the refugee, or the fisher returning to shore.
Listen to Silent Night in Konkani
To remember these voices is not to erase difference but to honour a shared search for peace. Faith, as the Vatican teaches, means standing with those who suffer. Christmas is not one people’s triumph but a reminder that every act of justice, every prayer for freedom, in Bethlehem or beyond, is its own carol.
If Christmas poems began in Latin and found their way into Scottish song, in Goa, they now live in Konkani choruses and children’s school plays. The anthology Tinsel Tales gathers many such voices. Christmas here is a mosaic: cakes in mining towns, choirs under palm leaves, Catholic, Hindu, and Muslim neighbours exchanging sweets.
The Goan Christmas poem is not written in rhyme but in ritual - in the smell of sorpotel bubbling on a fire, the sound of O Come All Ye Faithful drifting from a neighbour’s window, the rustle of coconut leaves. It begins with the cleaning of the balcao, the painting of walls, and the hanging of paper stars. Children practise carols in Konkani and English; families wait for midnight Mass, then return home to cake, bebinca, port, and/or coffee. At midnight, when the music softens, someone always plays Auld Lang Syne - a melody that has somehow joined the liturgy of the season. In Goa, faith becomes weather: humid, musical, communal. Rossetti’s “Snow had fallen, snow on snow” becomes, here, “rain has fallen, rain on rain.” The same longing, the same offering of heart - just a different season.
Christmas poetry survives because it is elastic. It belongs to empires and to the displaced, to pulpits and to dance halls. From Rossetti’s “In the bleak midwinter” to Basu’s “Hey babā Jesus,” to Burns’s “For auld lang syne,” each lyric is an attempt to hold time still - to say: remember.
The critic Harold Bloom once observed that memory “presupposes a universe in which all images and desires are meaningful unless and until the estrangement is enacted.” Christmas poetry lives in that estrangement, the awareness that we are singing to recover something already lost.
And so, as midnight fades on the Goan coast and the speakers switch from carols to that old Scottish hymn, I let the tears come again. Not for Bethlehem or Santa, but for memory itself - for the half-remembered childhoods of a country that learned its carols through translation, for the people who have sung of winter while sweating through December, for the enduring need to find music at the edge of a year.
“For auld lang syne, my dear, for auld lang syne, / We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet…”
For old times’ sake - and for all the times yet to come - we keep singing.
Saachi D’Souza is a writer and editor. Her work appears in various publications including Times of India, Goya Journal, Citizen Matters and Asia Democracy Chronicles.
Banner image by Ben White downloaded from Unsplash.com