Christmas! That beautiful word immediately conjures up visions of Midnight Mass (now sadly 10 pm Mass), the Christmas and New Year dances, carol singing, setting up Christmas trees and cribs, an extra drink or two, food made with East Indian bottle masala and last, but certainly not the least, sweet-making of the most mouth-watering kind. In short, joy unconfined!

When it comes to Christmas, there’s no better place in which to celebrate it than Bandra, the capital of the East Indian community. The exciting journey - the advent if I may say so - of celebrating Christmas here, starts off about the 10th of the month, when the serious business of sweet-making engages the attention of all the ladies of the house. Kul kuls, or little nibbles of deep-fried sugar-coated batter with indentations produced by pressing a fork into the raw batter, and guava cheese, which is not really a cheese at all but a sweet sticky slab of reduced guava, are a must in every East Indian house. But that is just for starters. Then comes the vanilla and chocolate fudge, coconut ice, marzipans, thali sweet, bolo de coco, and bolo de Portugal, the latter two confections being the Portuguese contribution to the culinary delights of Christmas. Finally, the traditional Christmas cake, an exercise in which I swear my mother was the champion of them all. Sugar is supposedly the new tobacco and all the foregoing involves sugar a-plenty. But hey, who cares? Hopefully, one day the gloomy sugar bogey will go out of the window, like the late lamented cholesterol, and deal the pharma lobby another well-deserved body blow.