Source: Abbotsford Downtown Facebook page
By Steve Burgess | TheTyee | Canada |
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.”
Read the full story, ‘Sikh Christmas in the Bible Belt’ (TheTyee, 22 Dec 2021), here.
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A letter to SGPC: Unethical conversion of Sikhs in Punjab (Asia Samachar, 24 Dec 2021)
ASIA SAMACHAR is an online newspaper for Sikhs / Punjabis in Southeast Asia and beyond.Facebook | WhatsApp +6017-335-1399 | Email: editor@asiasamachar.com | Twitter | Instagram | Obituary announcements, click here
