The most wonderful time of the year

For the desi abroad, Christmas means going back home

SLOUGH, ENGLAND:

November is about to plunge frostily into December, and here in the UK, that means just one thing: Christmas.

If supermarkets are to be believed, the Christmas season begins at the stroke of midnight after Halloween ends. Overnight, shop decorations switch from orange and black to red and green. Skulls and spider webs make way for Santa cut-outs and Christmas trees. Chocolate boxes, bolder and prettier than ever, jostle for attention. Gift sets lie in wait in the cosmetics aisle, waiting to be scooped up by a harried last-minute shopper. Even offices get caught up in the tide, sending out mass Christmas party invitations. Schools organise Christmas fairs selling what can charitably be described as rubbish, which your (or at least my) easily duped children are desperate to accumulate. Streaming services bump Home Alone and Love Actually up to the top of recommended lists. With every day you tick off in December, Christmas songs in shops and on the radio remind you constantly that it is the most wonderful time of the year.

I could not agree more. As a Muslim Pakistani woman living in the UK, my cup of joy may not be linked to a tree in the living room and a pile of presents, but it is indelibly bonded with something better: flying back home to Karachi for two glorious weeks.

The ideal Karachi trip

If there is anything more exciting than going from London to Karachi in December, I'm not sure what it is. The moment you push your luggage trolley through those doors at the airport and walk into the arms of your family, your heart dials back to factory settings. You feel the warmth of the afternoon sun on your entire body and are reminded instantly that 'warmth' is something you have not experienced outdoors since September.

As your car pinballs home through the free-wheeling traffic, you soak in the blanket of joy that only being home can bring. A pile of wedding cards demands your attention, complete with a complicated Venn diagram of clashing dates. Your inner Karachiite reawakens as you analyse which relative is the least likely to explode in the event of a no. You plot the rest of your trip accordingly. Two weeks are never enough, but you have no choice.

You pick up new clothes, since your suitcase contained mostly presents. You fill up your evenings meeting friends and cousins you haven't set eyes on in a year. You gracefully accept presents of lawn shirts, even though you are unlikely to need them in the British summer (the meteorological equivalent of a Karachi winter).

You discard your solemn ambition to avoid 'outside food' and cave into the temptation of nihari. If the price of nihari is a bout of gastro discomfort, you are happy to accept it. Besides, you are in Karachi, a place where any medicine under the sun is available over the counter. And if it isn't, you can always visit a doctor. In your UK town, the receptionist at your local clinic no longer answers the phone, so you haven't actually seen a doctor in about a year. You are almost looking forward to the experience.

Not only are you back in the world of cousins and friends and nihari and accessible medication, you are also in a land where your laundry – which, you realise with a jolt of pleasure, is being taken care of by someone else) dries the same day it is washed. This, you understand, is a heaven on earth.

The lead up

Before you can experience this slice of paradise, of course, you have to get there. For the parent of a school-going child who classifies anything above 20C as a 'heatwave', you can forget about visiting Karachi in August. Instead, you spend all year saving up for eye-watering tickets back home in the festive season, that special time of year when the airline industry assumes its patrons store spare bars of gold in their pantries. Come December 1, you dust off that suitcase and fling it open on your bedroom floor.

The sight of that suitcase waiting to be filled is what a child must experience on Christmas morning waiting to open those presents under the tree. That suitcase is a symbol of good things to come.

You pull up last year's present spreadsheet, faithfully assigning a gift to each person's name. It would be inconceivable that you set forth from these exotic shores empty-handed. You realise the spreadsheet is in need of a serious upgrade. Some cousins have got married. Others have had children. Do you buy them all a mass of T-shirts and be done with it? No. You have no idea what size anyone is after a year.

Chocolate, you realise, is the answer to most of life's problems. Just as explorers once brought back spices from their travels, you go armed with chocolate before setting foot on a plane. It is the law of travel.

Off you pop to the shops. As Michael Bublé croons Jingle Bells over the supermarket speakers, you make a beeline for the confectionary aisle and load up your trolley with those brightly coloured boxes of chocolate that have been jostling for position since the beginning of November. You carefully select the ones that are a regular shape (as opposed to, say, a triangular prism or an octagon) so as to take minimal volume in your wide-open suitcase on the bedroom floor. The cousins' children will have to make do with smaller packets of the stuff. There are only so many boxes you can take.

You study your chocolate-filled trolley and realise that actually, chocolate uses up precious luggage kilos and is probably not the answer to every single problem in life. Sometimes, gift-buying problems can also be solved with little bottles of moisturiser. Off you dash to the cosmetics aisle, offering a small prayer of thanks for the Christmas retail haven you are in and throw in those gift sets that were lying in wait just for you.

At last, your suitcase is filled. Somehow, you even manage to squeeze a couple of your own clothes inside. Your bags are packed, you're ready to go. You board the plane and slip on the headphones. On the screen before you are a series of Christmas films. You start with Love Actually and move on to Home Alone. These works of art, with their themes of love and togetherness, speak to your soul as you journey through the skies back home. Those Christmas songs were not wrong. It really is the most wonderful time of the year.