It is Christmas Day, and the signs are everywhere across the capital. The winter chill has finally settled in, proper and bracing, and for once the city was rewarded with a rare gift yesterday. A clear blue sky and bright winter sun. For Dilli wallahs accustomed to peering through a fog of grey each December, it felt almost indulgent. The city seemed to breathe a little easier, and so did we.
Last week, walking through Connaught Place’s inner circle, I caught a familiar and deeply comforting scent. Warm butter, spice, and fruit. The unmistakable aroma of freshly baked plum cakes drifting out of Wenger’s. December does that to you. It slows you down, nudges you indoors, reminds you why it is called the most wonderful time of the year.
Delhi, after all, is a city built on arrivals. As the capital, it has long gathered communities from across regions and faiths, becoming a true melting pot of traditions, languages, and kitchens. Christmas here is not a single note but a layered chorus, shaped by where people come from and what they choose to carry forward.
If one listens closely, Delhi’s Christmas carries older echoes too. During the years of the colonisers, many Christian families settled near Turkman Gate in Old Delhi, folding their faith gently into the rhythms of the walled city. Christmas Day came to be known as Eid-e-Tawallud, the festival of birth, words shaped by Hindustani and Mughal usage and lived without borders. This history, as Aali Kumar, a former professor of history at Delhi University and a resident of Safdarjung Enclave, often shares on her Facebook, reveals how naturally belief once flowed into the city’s shared vocabulary. Even today, she notes, midnight services rise with hymns in Urdu and Punjabi. Dholaks and manjiras sometimes keep time. Carol groups move through lanes, pausing at doorways. Songs are offered, food is exchanged, and Christmas feels less like a date on the calendar and more like a shared memory.
In South Delhi’s Alaknanda, Cincy Jose lives with her parents and describes a Christmas that feels transported from Kerala. Her parents, Lucy and Jose, moved from Thrissur in the 1980s. Cincy was born in the early nineties, but the rhythms of home have remained unchanged. Christmas morning begins with vattayappam, a soft steamed rice cake, and buff curry for breakfast. Her mother’s table is resolutely Keralite, and lunch is never complete without biryani. In recent years, another layer has quietly joined the spread. Cincy’s partner, a Bengali who loves to cook, now brings his signature Gondhoraj Lebu chicken. This year, she laughs, her mother has specifically asked him to make it.
Today, chef Ruchira Hoon is hosting a Malabari Christmas lunch at Draavin Canteen. For her, the menu is deeply personal. She grew up around Kerala food and wanted to recreate the generosity and warmth of a Malabar Christian Christmas feast. Coconut takes centre stage, roasted and unroasted, finely cut and generously used, lending its many moods to the dishes.
The Malabar Christmas table, she explains, always has a roast. It could be egg, duck, or mutton. There is almost always a duck mapas, rich and celebratory. Her aim is to bring these elements together without diluting their soul. The inspiration is a true home style Syrian Christian table, abundant, honest, and rooted in memory.
In Gurgaon chef Tanisha Phanbuh, who hails from Meghalaya, has been busy hosting friends and family for a feast. “Generally in Meghalaya during Christmas the food is the local food that we’ve grown up eating. Christmas means family time and all of us sit around the kitchen and cook together or even go out for Christmas picnics, but the food is Khasi food. The piece de resistance is the Doh nei ïong (black sesame pork) and then we also make Ja stem (turmeric yellow rice), phan sdieh (fried potato), muli khleh (radish perilla salad) and grandmas roast chicken amongst other things. We start out thinking of 3 things but it always becomes a treat of at least 23 things in my house!” she quips.
Across neighbourhoods and kitchens, Christmas in Delhi reveals itself as a season shaped by shared tables, borrowed words, and the simple grace of remembering together.