KARACHI: Professor Inayatdin skillfully plays the piano as his daughter, Dr. Jennifer Maqbool, leads the family into singing a melodious Christmas carol. A Christmas tree adorned with decorations, bright lights throughout the house, and singing voices ensures there’s plenty of Christmas festivity in the air at this Karachi house.
Every year, millions of Christians around the world mark December 25 as the birthday of Jesus Christ, whom they believe to be the son of God and savior of humanity. For centuries, Christians have celebrated the event by getting together with friends and families, exchanging gifts, and cooking sumptuous meals.
Dr. Maqbool’s home in Pakistan’s southern port city of Karachi is no different.
“Love and peace and mankind; this is the message of Christmas,” Dr. Maqbool told Arab News. “And we are celebrating it here with fervor in Pakistan,” she added, placing an unbaked cake into her oven.
In the other room, children decorate the house with bright lights and vibrant decorations as Dr. Maqbool makes her way to the heart of the home – the kitchen – where the sweet aroma of Christmas awaits.
“Pakistanis enjoy Christmas very much. Christmas programs and the Christmas season start for us from the end of November,” Dr. Maqbool explained.
Pakistan is home to 2.63 million Christians, the third-largest religious community in the predominantly Muslim South Asian country. Pakistan’s Christian community starts preparing for the festive event before December begins.
These preparations, Dr. Maqbool said, include making snacks, baking cakes, buying Christmas gifts for friends and relatives, and organizing church plays, dramas, bonfires and carol parties.
“All this is a part of Christmas,” she said, smiling.
While the adults look forward to the mouth-watering dishes and desserts, the children’s minds are preoccupied with something else.
“The children have already written letters to Santa Claus for the gifts they want,” Dr. Maqbool said.
“And if they have been good, Santa Claus will be bringing gifts and hiding them in the house somewhere. And he will leave clues and they will then find their gifts.”
Mishal Munawar, one of the children and Dr. Maqbool’s relative, said she was decorating the Christmas tree in the house.
“The Christmas tree is very mandatory,” Munawar told Arab News. “We put lights, bells, gifts, toffees, and a small Santa Claus, and flowers.”
Sigil Shafiq is one of Dr. Maqbool’s many family friends who take part in the festivities a day before Christmas.
“We love to put on festive clothes,” Shafiq told Arab News. “We usually like to get bright colors for Christmas like red and blue and green. And we like to buy bangles and dangly earrings and we like to put henna,” she added.
Shafiq said they spend time getting ready for Christmas by visiting beauty parlors and getting facials.
“It’s a good time. We have fun doing it,” she said.
For Dr. Maqbool and other Christians around the world, Christmas brings with it friends and family members from far and wide.
“All my sisters lovingly come all the way from Dubai, from Australia, [and] from Canada. We have a big gathering in our house,” she said.
With only a day left before Christmas, excitement hangs heavy in the house. And Dr. Maqbool is quite pleased with all that has been achieved so far.
“A Merry Christmas to everybody from Pakistan, my beloved homeland my beloved country,” she said.
Lights, carols, and decorations: In Karachi, a Christian family’s home comes alive every Christmas
https://arab.news/pk7as
Lights, carols, and decorations: In Karachi, a Christian family’s home comes alive every Christmas
- At Dr. Jennifer Maqbool’s house, Christmas celebrations involve singing carols, cooking up sumptuous meals, and plenty of decorations
- Millions of Christians around the world celebrate December 25 as the birthday of Jesus Christ, whom they consider the savior of humanity
Global gems go under the hammer
- International highlights from Sotheby’s ‘Origins II’ auction, which takes place Jan. 31 in Diriyah
Andy Warhol
‘Muhammad Ali’
Arguably the most famous name in pop art meets arguably the most famous sportsman of the 20th century in this set of four screen prints from 1978, created at the behest of US investment banker Richard Weisman. “I felt putting the series together was natural, in that two of the most popular leisure activities at the time were sports and art, yet to my knowledge they had no direct connection,” Weisman said in 2007. “Therefore I thought that having Andy do the series would inspire people who loved sport to come into galleries, maybe for the first time, and people who liked art would take their first look at a sports superstar.” Warhol travelled to Ali’s training camp to take Polaroids for his research, and was “arrested by the serene focus underlying Ali’s power — his contemplative stillness, his inward discipline,” the auction catalogue states.
Jean-Michel Basquiat
‘Untitled’
Basquiat “emerged from New York’s downtown scene to become one of the most influential artists of the late 20th century,” Sotheby’s says. The largely self-taught artist’s 1985 work, seen here, “stands as a vivid testament to (his) singular ability to transform drawing into a site of intellectual inquiry, cultural memory, and visceral self-expression.” Basquiat, who was of Caribbean and Puerto Rican heritage, “developed a visual language of extraordinary immediacy and intelligence, in which image and text collide with raw urgency,” the catalogue continues.
Camille Pissarro
‘Vue de Zevekote, Knokke’
The “Knokke” of the title is Knokke-sur-Mer, a Belgian seaside village, where the hugely influential French-Danish Impressionist stayed in the summer of 1894 and produced 14 paintings, including this one. The village, Sotheby’s says, appealed to Pissarro’s “enduring interest in provincial life.” In this work, “staccato brushstrokes, reminiscent of Pissarro’s paintings of the 1880s, coalesce with the earthy color palette of his later work. The resulting landscape, bathed in a sunlit glow, celebrates the quaint rural environments for which (he) is best known.”
David Hockney
‘5 May’
This iPad drawing comes from the celebrated English artist’s 2011 series “Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011,” which Sotheby’s describes as “one of the artist’s most vibrant and ambitious explorations of landscape, perception, and technological possibility.” Each image in the series documents “subtle shifts in color, light and atmosphere” on the same stretch of the Woldgate, “showing the landscape as something experienced over time rather than frozen in an instant.” The catalogue notes that spring has long been an inspiration for European artists, but says that “no artist has ever observed it so closely, with such fascinated and loving attention, nor recorded it in such detail as an evolving process.”
Zarina
‘Morning’
Sotheby’s describes Indian artist Zarina Hashmi — known by her first name — as “one of the most compelling figures in post-war international art — an artist whose spare, meditative works distilled the tumult of a peripatetic life into visual form.” She was born in Aligarh, British India, and “the tragedy of the 1947 Partition (shaped) a lifelong meditation on the nature of home as both physical place and spiritual concept.” This piece comes from a series of 36 woodcuts Zarina produced under the title “Home is a Foreign Place.”
George Condo
‘Untitled’
This 2016 oil-on-linen painting is the perfect example of what the US artist has called “psychological cubism,” which Sotheby’s defines as “a radical reconfiguration of the human figure that fractures identity into simultaneous emotional and perceptual states.” It’s a piece that “distills decades of inquiry into the mechanics of portraiture, drawing upon art-historical precedent while decisively asserting a contemporary idiom that is at once incisive and darkly humorous,” the catalogue notes, adding that the work is “searing with psychological tension and painterly bravura.”
