KARACHI: The best place for buying Christmas decorations and bakery items in the city is Bohri Bazaar and Saddar. But it is also true that most of the time traffic in these parts of town is chaotic. That’s when the other places selling decorative stuff come into the picture.

These days you can find several stalls selling Christmas decorations in shopping malls. The malls are also decorated with the things they are selling so visitors feel inspired to buy something or the other for their homes. And what’s exceptional about this is that most of the customers are not really Christians. Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and Parsis also buy the Christmas decorations. Meanwhile, Christians may be buying what goes under the Christmas trees. It is a good time for buying gifts, too, with so many seasonal sales going on.

Other than the shopping malls, you also come across such stalls in commercial areas, outside big supermarkets, bookstores, toy shops, eateries or the florists. There are also kids selling Santa Claus hats along with little decorations, which they can easily carry at some traffic signals.

At one such stall set up outside a popular supermarket in Clifton, there was a family of four looking through the pretty decorations for sale. The two little girls, Chitra and Ritika, were selecting the shiny and glittery ornaments while their mom Veena was looking at the greeting cards.

Checking if their car was parked properly, dad Mohan Lakhani came back to look at the Christmas trees. Mom Veena smiled. “We already got a nice Christmas tree some four to five years ago,” she told Dawn. “Still, we do get some new decorations for the tree every year,” she added.

Asked if their not being Christian mattered, the lady shook her head. “I don’t think that one’s faith has anything to do with the celebration of Christmas anymore. It is a culture, a festival and we enjoy the festivities,” she explained.

There were also two Muslim girls at the stall, admiring the ornaments including the hanging glass balls and stars, sledge and reindeer, Santa cutouts, fairy lights, reindeer headbands with red nose, Santa caps, etc. “I’m looking for tiny Santa hats for my cat to wear,” said Sameera, one of the girls.

Meanwhile, her friend looked interested in a cute, round, bouncy snowman, which she ended up buying, too.

“This Christmas, most of the items that we were expecting could not reach here on time,” said the stall owner Shams Vidani, who has been selling Christmas decorations at the same spot around this time every year for the last five years now. He said that the containers reach Pakistan from the United Arab Emirates. But the things are mostly all made in China.

“The ship containers carrying such stuff have got stuck somewhere on the way,” he informed, while straightening his pile of jigsaw puzzles of pretty scenes, somewhere a white Christmas, somewhere a decorated Church. Still, his stall was loaded with all kinds of pretty things. Small stockings to hang on trees and proper bigger ones to stuff with gifts and goodies.

“Acquiring these things have more to do with luck than my choice, actually. I don’t know what will come out of the container next. It is all random stuff,” he explained.

Vidani said that the first thing that he sold this year was a beautiful snow-covered Church model. He still had a picture he had taken of it in his phone. “It was so pretty. It sold for Rs25,000 almost immediately,” he said. Another quick sale was of a Santa Claus doll. That sold for Rs15,000.

Meanwhile, his tallest trees of about seven feet in height, green or snow-covered, though all plastic, bore the Rs37,000 price tag. “I have little one-foot high trees also. Those cost Rs450 only,” he said, while pointing out that he had something to suit every pocket and every customer.

Published in Dawn, December 22nd, 2023