“All I have to do is use an electronic check-in kiosk,” I thought. Wrong. Although my IndiGo airlines ticket to Goa, India’s west coast playground state, had been secured long before Christmas when many Mumbaikars and other celebrants rush for scant seats at exorbitant prices, I discovered that I had been bumped to a much later flight. I was forced to join the long line of Goa-bound revelers at Mumbai airport, including a group of five young women wearing jeans, a guitar-toting American man, and a traditionally-dressed, chatty family of Mumbai teachers returning ‘home.’ Luckily my protests at the check-in counter got me a seat on an earlier flight and I was on my way. Christmas in Goa is a two-week long affair, and I couldn’t wait.

Huge star-shaped paper lanterns crafted by traditional kite-makers and hoisted high in trees or atop roofs are poor markers in the night sky for modern-day Magi, but they add to the sense of Christmas everywhere.

Goa’s grand Renaissance and Baroque Catholic churches, built after 1498 when Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama landed on Goa’s tropical shores, its beaches and its casual bars (where booze is untaxed and therefore flowing) all make for an irresistible backdrop for an Indian Christmas experience.

Photo credit: Zahid Sardar

Although Christmas is just one of many festivals Goans celebrate, it is, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful. Charter flight-loads of Britons and Europeans seeking an authentic experience devoid of department store artifice come in larger numbers each year. The weather also helps, as does the accessibility. “In Goa, nothing is too far from a church, temple, or bar,” quips Shaila Shah, a former Mumbaikar from London who now regularly winters in India’s Christmas capital.  

Photo credit: Zahid Sardar

Most Indian Catholics are in Goa—thanks to Portuguese colonizers proselytizing for nearly 500 years—and a couple of days before Christmas they string lights, hang lanterns and decorate their colonial-era bungalows with wreaths. Visiting Mumbaikars (including fashion designers like Arjun Khanna and Bollywood celebrities like Kimi Katkar) convene at private Christmas parties at homes with sprawling lawns—a virtually impossible luxury in space-starved Mumbai—and at off-beat music clubs like House of Lloyd’s in North Goa where Goa’s legendary songstress Lorna Cordeiro often belts out familiar Konkani tunes laced with Portuguese lyrics. At places like Lloyd’s, barbecued steaks, ham and turkey vie for attention alongside Goa’s famous spicy shrimp curry with coconut, and seasonal puddings, crescent-shaped neuryos, many-layered bebinka and rice-and-coconut dodol cakes. On Goa’s Brahmin Christian island of Divar (flat-bottomed ferries connect it to the mainland) or in Christian enclaves in Sucorro-Carrem in the Bardez area where narrow and normally dark country lanes running through ancestral properties and paddy fields are aglow with lights. Ancient churches and even some relatively new Hindu temples (older ones were destroyed by the Portuguese) are festooned with strings of little ‘fairy’ lights and small neighborhood stores and bakeries trot out reusable plastic Christmas trees that are gaily trimmed with bells, glass balls and cotton puffs that stand in for real snow in the 80-degree Fahrenheit temperatures. Santa Claus makes an appearance either in the flesh or as a life-size plastic facsimile. Huge star-shaped paper lanterns crafted by traditional kite-makers and hoisted high in trees or atop roofs are poor markers in the night sky for modern-day Magi, but they add to the sense of Christmas everywhere.

Photo credit: Zahid Sardar

Of course all this seems surreal amid palm and cashew trees (sources of the state’s infamous feni liquor), and riverside mangrove thickets. However, there is no more surreal or louder patch than the western coastal stretch between Fort Aguada and Vagator where thatched beachside karaoke bars like Calamari in Candolim are packed with hippies, sun worshippers and carolers alike. Christmas in Goa includes Sunburn, the popular 7–year old electronic dance music festival with multiple stages for star DJs. Ever-growing, it has now been moved from Candolim to a larger beach in Vagator, and Candolim is now the scene of a brand -new competing EDM festival called Vh1 Supersonic. The lively young festival crowds, as well as New Year’s Eve fireworks from nearly every beachside establishment, keep Goa hopping well into the New Year when ‘Christmas’ eventually fades into the feast of Three Kings or Epiphany on January 6th.

Photo credit: Sid Sheorey

Such merriment notwithstanding, what really distinguishes a Goa Christmas is an element of religious sincerity. In Old Goa where the centuries-old body of St. Francis Xavier lies in the famous 1605 Basilica of Bom Jesus, supplicants wait in line for hours for a viewing of his periodically opened casket (Due to be exposed again in 2014). Goa may be one of the last enclaves where people throng to its ancient world heritage site churches not as tourists but as true believers. Take the people gathered at midnight on Christmas Eve at the 1628 St. Elizabeth church in Ucassaim near the town of Mapusa. In its dark entry courtyard—none of the fancy lights were on due to a power-outage—an overflow crowd of rice farmers and country parishioners stood solemnly dressed in their finest western clothes and saris for mass. Emergency lights cast an eerie fluorescent glow over the lucky worshippers packed within the church’s nave, captivated by the homily delivered in Konkani. Just as the prelate ended, the incandescent lights came back on. The musicians lifted their instruments and while the choir sang in Konkani, the entire congregation swirled around for a sacramental wafer and then slid past the musicians through a side door to an interior courtyard where a de rigueur nativity scene was constructed on one side. In a dimly lit corner, two little girls dressed in red clothes (Santa’s helpers?) greeted everyone in line and offered a small wrapped gift to those who reached out for one. The crowd then exited through a side door in the church’s Baroque façade where yet another pair of children patiently handed out pieces of homemade plum cake—perhaps fulfilling the charitable mission of the church’s patron Saint Elizabeth, the benevolent 14^th century Queen of Portugal.

Photo credit: Zahid Sardar

The entry courtyard was now twinkling with lights and lanterns. A temporary stage was set up on one side for a band that would soon strike up for the Christmas ball that I could not stay for. I imagined the well-dressed couples in suits and saris leaving the church, dancing slowly in the night air.  “Merry Christmas,” I heard someone say. And, it was so.