24th December: Christmas Eve.
The date of my late grandmother's birthday.
Without fail, every Christmas no matter where in the world, everyone puts aside their worries and anxiety and finds time to be back in Malaysia. This time of the year is undeniably important to me because it is also my grandmother's birthday. Put celebrating Christmas and her birthday together plus the presence of my 30 first cousins and countless relatives - it is one of the best feeling's and what possibly gets me through the first semester. It is only during this time of the year that everyone finds time to come back to celebrate. Coming from an extremely large family, it's fair to say we get this seldom. The commemoration usually lasts about a week, where relatives living in the city drive down, where families living overseas like us fly back, and where cousins studying in college travel back - all to my grandmother's house in the suburbs of KL. Every Christmas Eve, we all celebrate my grandmother's birthday dinner at her favourite restaurant, which we usually tend to take up the whole of. At midnight, we would all wish each other "Merry Christmas" but a phrase we would never fail to hear from my grandmother is: "The Lord is always with you through all the evil and good. Never give up and your hard work will pay off. Don't ever forget that." It's an event that just happens, and that everyone just knows about, that it's no longer questioned. We used to dress up in our traditional Chinese attire as it was my grandmother's wish, but in recent years, the stubbornness of us teenager's have kicked in. We didn't know how much longer this would last, but all we wanted was for my grandmother to be happy. That way, we were all happy.
It wasn't until September last year that she passed away.
But even so, we continue this so-called-tradition, not just because we knew it was her wish, but because we all felt like somehow, being together at this time of the year, was definitely a good feeling.
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