There is something unmistakably tender about December in an Indian home. The air may not always be freezing, but it carries its own kind of winter. A winter that arrives with woollen shawls being pulled out of trunks and warm lights complimenting early sunsets. An Indian Christmas has never really been about snow; it has always been about the particular way we rewrite celebration: louder, warmer, more intimate, and endlessly inventive.
It doesn’t bring snowballs or sleigh bells, instead it’s marked by smells of rum’n’raisin cakes drifting from busy kitchens, sounds of carols fighting with traffic for attention, visions of entire markets taken over by Santa masks, and the feeling of the year winding down with a sigh of satisfaction. It’s a postcard winter of our own making, nostalgically commercial and reflective of the one we live in.
Christmas often starts way before it arrives in the calendar. It shows up in the glow from fairy lights in tiny balconies and in the remixed carols with Bollywood songs, announcing themselves as December’s unofficial anthems. A desi Christmas is a nod to the winter where one day feels like Shimla and the next feels like an afternoon in Goa, demanding celebration with every varying degree in this wild ride we call winter, not caring if it’s 5 degrees in Delhi, or a sweaty 25 degrees in Chennai.
This season is a reminder that celebration becomes muscle memory. Christmas doesn’t belong to a climate; it belongs to the conversations that stretch long into the night, the generosity exchanged through gift hampers, and that unspoken rule nobody comes or leaves empty-handed. Above all, it reminds us that the celebration just needs to feel like us—chaotic, messy, colourful, generous, and endlessly warm.
At its heart, it’s about gathering whatever makes us feel held, especially through a winter lived between nostalgia, noise, and that strange end-of-year stillness. And while the world dreams of a white Christmas, this is the world we wanted to emulate when building this year’s Christmas collection. The goal wasn’t “perfect”; it was to make something that could sit on your bedside table and feel like your winter.
This is our ode to that feeling.
Wishing you a warm and very desi Christmas,
The Bare Bar Family.