- originally written in fall 2021 -
American work holidays revolve around the observance of Christian holidays and nationalistic pride. Desi-Americans who adhere to different religions come together every year to celebrate Diwali, Vaisakhi, Ramadan and more outside of their regularly scheduled days off. This leaves a weird void, however, on days that we are expected to celebrate holidays we might not relate to with the rest of the country.
Many Desi families — anecdotally those of many of my friends — disregard these holidays entirely and treat them like normal days. Others like my family take part in the celebrations as they deem fit. In my household, we have almost always celebrated Thanksgiving and Christmas ever since I could remember.
With the exception of Indian Christians, the religious aspects of these days don’t fit in for many of us. And although Thanksgiving isn’t necessarily a religious holiday, it remains an enduring symbol of American culture that may not fit in well with customs practiced by minority ethnic groups.
I want to share a relevant story from my childhood. In third or fourth grade, I visited my friend Abhi to celebrate Thanksgiving with him and his family. His family and family friends were vegetarians, so they could not partake in the traditional Thanksgiving dinner (whose centerpiece consists of a meat like turkey or ham). Being raised in a meat-eating household where I had had exposure to these dinners before, I threw a huge tantrum about the vegetarian South Indian food they provided because I felt I was being robbed of the Thanksgiving experience.
I never realized why this memory stuck with me so much until I grew up and was able to reflect upon it properly. The American school system standardizes these longstanding practices — the Thanksgiving dinner, the Christmas tree, the July 4th barbecue — ingraining them into our consciences from elementary school onward. Drawing turkeys, making christmas lists and going on easter egg hunts are quintessential to the American elementary school experience.
Due to a lack of attention and often a lack of knowledge on the part of teachers, the same system neglects other important religious and cultural holidays in a way that limits childrens’ understanding often of their own cultures. While some efforts are made to combat this — I fondly recall making dumplings with my ethnically diverse second-grade class for Lunar New Year — on an aggregate level, students are taught to measure time and the structure of the school year by these American and Christian holidays that many do not conform to.
Diwali, the Hindu new year, occurs every fall. Baisakhi, the Sikh new year, occurs every spring. Our Desi parents, their parents and their ancestors were raised in cultures and school systems that upheld and underscored the importance of such holidays. As a kid, I was always jealous of my cousins who got weeks off of school for Diwali while I had to wait until Thanksgiving weeks later.
And despite the separation of church and state in this country, which allots few days even for the Judeo-Christian holidays, we still learn about these holidays in a way that uplifts their importance at the cost of forsaking others. I am so thankful for my family educating me separately about our culture and our holidays — even then, I still think about time in terms of Christmases or Thanksgivings rather than Diwalis or Navratris.
And this disregarding of American multiculturalism pervades way past the K-12 school system — from workplaces to retail sales to advertising to seasonal music, we are endlessly barraged with this particular idea of a calendar year being perceived in a certain way by the general public. At most, we see vapid company events or political posts about various holidays that were so obviously written by PR teams with no true objectives aside from keeping up the appearance of inclusivity.
Our country, its government and its industries constantly pride themselves on our secularism multi-ethnic melting pot. However, when it comes to actually putting forth the cultures they claim to be so proud of, there is little to no effort displayed on actually making us feel included. This is why I felt so alienated and confused at that Thanksgiving dinner. I was so bought into this idea of American culture as the default way of life that I couldn’t make sense of being presented with something that broke its conventions.
Obviously, this couldn’t have been apparent to me as a third-grader. Looking back on it now, the reason it stuck with me was because it was an unconscious rejection of my own culture. I couldn’t see what I see now — that “American culture” means so many different things to so many different people from different backgrounds. That Thanksgiving dinner, with its amazing South Indian cuisine, was just as valid as any unseasoned turkey feast others enjoy annually.
In the past few years, my family has given up on the latter entirely. We proudly and unapologetically celebrate our presence in this country by filling our neighborhood block with the aroma of our incredible cooking. This is the country we reside in — one wherein we are supposed to pave our own paths and make our own lives. It is not necessarily the rigid, tightly-wound nation that we are presented with from our first days in school onward to the fabric of our lives.
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