'How do you celebrate Christmas back home?' — the polite face of white supremacy

The question arrives in the week before the holiday shutdown, usually at the awkward office party or over a strained video call. It is meant to be inclusive, a gesture of mild interest. ‘So, how do you celebrate Christmas back home?’

The phrasing is polite. The intention, usually, is harmless. But the question itself is a finely-calibrated piece of cultural machinery, designed to uphold a very specific worldview. It is the polite face of a subtle, pervasive supremacy.

Let’s start with ‘Christmas’. The question isn’t ‘What do you celebrate in winter?’. It is not an open-ended enquiry into your own culture’s significant moments. It establishes Christmas as the fixed point, the universal standard, from which all other traditions are measured as deviations.

Then, ‘back home’. A tidy piece of othering. It implies that wherever you are now, you are a guest. Your true home, and by extension your true culture, is elsewhere. For many of us, born and raised in the very country where the question is being asked, it is a casual reminder that our face does not match the default.

Combined, the question translates to: ‘My default experience is the world’s default experience. Tell me about your charmingly provincial footnote.’

This is not the aggressive supremacy of hate, but the far more common and insidious supremacy of assumption. It is the unthinking belief that a Western, Christian-centric calendar is the world’s operating system. Everyone else is an app, expected to run quietly in the background.

By centring Christmas, you flatten the lived experiences of billions. The complex, vibrant, deeply meaningful celebrations of Diwali, Eid, Hanukkah, Lunar New Year, Nowruz — they are all bundled into a single negative category: ‘not-Christmas’. They are implicitly demoted, their significance erased by a framework that only has one slot for ‘main holiday’.

And so you face a choice. The path of least resistance is to soften the answer. ‘Oh, we don’t really celebrate it, but it’s a nice time for family.’ Or we perform a version of our own culture that is palatable and Christmas-adjacent. We talk about giving gifts or eating a special meal, framing our own traditions in their terms.

We do this because it is tiring to always be the educator, the one who has to explain that the world is bigger than the view from a single window. It is exhausting to have to gently dismantle the assumptions of a well-meaning colleague just to feel seen.

But the honest answer is the only one with any integrity. The honest answer is, ‘We don’t.’ For me, ‘back home’ — which is right here — the major event is Diwali. It has nothing to do with Christmas. There is no tree, no turkey, no baby Jesus. It has its own history, its own cosmology, its own weight.

To give this answer is not an act of aggression. It is an act of respectful dissent. It is a refusal to have one’s own culture flattened and repackaged for convenient consumption. It is a small but necessary correction to a worldview that has gone unchallenged for too long.

This isn’t just about a single question. It is about who designs the ‘holiday’ cards, which days are public holidays, and what ‘festive’ means in retail. It is about the quiet, constant, ambient assumption of whose culture is the default and whose is the exotic exception.

The smallest assumptions are the bricks from which we build our hierarchies.