Sikh Christmas in the Bible Belt

Sharanjit Kaur Sandhra recently received a letter. It was written in Punjabi, which is understandable, since Sandhra and her family have long been members of the local Sikh community. The letter urged her and her family to convert to Christianity. That’s also unsurprising — Sandhra grew up in Abbotsford.

The cultural struggle surrounding the Christmas holiday season is nowhere as clear as in the Raspberry Capital of Canada. “It’s a Bible Belt town,” says Sandhra, who is a member of the history faculty at the University of the Fraser Valley. “But Abbotsford has one of the largest Sikh populations per capita in all of Canada. And yet we don’t recognize them.”

Abbotsford has the fourth-largest Sikh population of any Canadian city — 25 per cent of residents identified as South Asian in the 2016 census. Sandhra, who now lives in Aldergrove, grew up in Abbotsford celebrating Christmas in ways that anyone who has ever watched a holiday TV ad would recognize.

“It was about family and togetherness,” she says. “Cousins got together, my mom did the turkey dinner, we would eat and have fun and open presents. We had the tree and the Christmas lights. I grew up with that. We happily took part in all the school functions.”

As an adult, Sandhra has continued the tradition. “It’s huge in my family,” she says. “My boys still believe in Santa Claus. They write letters to Santa. My husband and I have to go through the whole escapade of pretending to be Santa. Because I believe in the spirit of imagination that the holiday brings.”

But in recent years Sandhra has had a growing awareness that Sikh acceptance of other religious traditions is not always reciprocated. “I struggle a lot, having been in Abbotsford and being proselytized to for 30-plus years,” she says. “As a Sikh I am taught not to approach that with hate. But it pisses me off to no end. Because these systems are entrenched in our politics in Abbotsford. They’re entrenched in our business structures.”

“When you’re growing up you don’t question it,” she says. “It’s not just Christmas holiday break. It’s Easter holiday break, it’s every kind of identity-making notion comes through that Christian lens. Even as a historian, writing AD and BCE, I struggle with it.”

Sandhra recently ran up against that entrenched attitude in a particularly upsetting way. Her youngest child attends an elementary school she estimates to be about “90 per cent South Asian,” but the school had never celebrated Diwali or Vaisakhi. When a new principal arrived, he wanted to institute the celebrations in order to show the kids they belonged.

“Oh my god, the pushback,” Sandhra says. “There were these five white women whose kids were at the school, and they lost their shit. ‘How dare you celebrate Diwali!’”

“That hurt me very deeply,” she says. “I just assumed it was a no-brainer.”

“My children deserve to see themselves reflected, right? Why is there this pushback? What is it about hearing about Sikhi or Islam or Buddhism that makes certain Christians very nervous? It’s about power.”

Moninder Singh, president of the Gurdwara Sahib Dasmesh Darbar in Surrey and spokesperson for the B.C. Gurdwaras Council, says that for B.C. Sikhs, there is no one approach to the Christmas season.

“The community in general doesn’t have one position,” he says. “You will find people who completely involve themselves in Christmas trees and Santa and the whole idea of Christmas, outside of the religious connotations. And you have those who will not engage at all.”

“There’s a deep respect in the Sikh community for any days that have a religious component,” he says. “There’s always an opportunity to reflect on values on these days, similar to days like Vaisakhi which are closer to our hearts. You look for the goodness in humanity, giving back to the community, finding ways to support people that are less privileged. As parents in every community, not just for Sikhs, those moral lessons are an opportunity to celebrate by giving back.”

There is a legend that Christians celebrate Christmas on Dec. 25 because the date coincides with the Roman festivals Saturnalia and the celebration of Sol Invictus. This idea is disputed by many modern historians, who consider it more likely that the winter Christmas follows naturally from the traditional March 25 celebration of the Annunciation. But whether or not Christians borrowed their holiday from Romans, coincidental religious celebrations can be handy. And as Singh explains, the Christmas season has a Sikh corollary.

“Around the same time as Christmas we have the celebration of the lives of the tenth guru of the Sikhs, Guru Gobind Singh, and his four children,” he says. “Oftentimes in our community things are repurposed that way.”

Sandhra teaches her own children about many different faiths. “I believe in the radical and revolutionary message that Jesus brought. I just don’t think he’s my lord and saviour,” she says. “In Sikhi we have a very different understanding of oneness. But we can learn about Jesus and don’t have to feel that our Sikhi, our faith, is being challenged through that process. That’s a powerful place to be, where you can love other religions and learn about their history and not feel somehow that it’s diminishing your own.”

Christmas is a joyful season in her family. Yet there is an uncomfortable awareness that at this time of year non-Christian families feel pressure to get with the program.

“It’s almost like a national identity is forged through partaking in Christmas celebrations,” she says. “It’s part of that idea that white people are always Canadian and people of colour are always hyphenated Canadians. There’s this enforcement of having to prove ourselves, to prove our involvement and inclusion in society through the celebration of Christmas.

“You want to push back on that. So my push back has been, if I can take the time and energy to teach my children about Jesus Christ why is it that Christians can’t take that same time to teach their children about Sikhi?”

“I choose to celebrate Christmas because I still love the season,” she says. “But I have evolved from growing up in Abbotsford and just accepting the way things are to challenging the systemic structures that enable that Christian evangelical tradition in the Fraser Valley.”

During the recent Fraser Valley flooding crisis, Sikh gurdwaras were often at the forefront of the community drive to come together to provide food to stranded travellers and displaced residents.

But the Sikh tradition of giving is not always celebrated in a society fed on the exclusive notion of “Christian charity,” Sandhra says.

“The city itself is implicated in that process,” Sandhra says. “They have a very Christian frame of thinking. [Abbotsford] councillors and the mayor constantly tout church charities, but they’ll never talk about the gurdwaras doing charitable work.”

“My faith is a way of seeking equity and inclusion and love,” she says. “I firmly believe in that. And I firmly believe Christians believe in that too. But there are evangelical Christians who refuse to partake in that process. That’s what bothers me.”

And that proselytizing letter? “Someone in my family ripped it up and threw it away before I got a chance to read which church it was from,” Sandhra says.

Just as well. Some secret Santas should probably remain a secret.

Tomorrow our visits with people of various faiths about how they experience Christmastime wraps up with a chat with a rabbi.

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Read the previous two pieces here:

How Did Colonel Sanders Become Japan’s Santa?

Aamer Haleem’s Pink Christmas Tree