Christmas

Goan Christmas involves a lot of people coming through the house, often into rooms that are otherwise private. That changes which rooms are worth spending on. The veranda, the front room and the dining room matter considerably more than they do the rest of the year.

It also raises a practical point about durability that people do not usually consider for a domestic scheme: a house that hosts a hundred visitors over a fortnight puts genuine wear on leading edges and hems, particularly at doorways and where curtains meet circulation routes.

For homes that do this every year, it is worth specifying the public rooms closer to contract standard than domestic, and keeping the more delicate choices for bedrooms and private spaces.

The Goan custom of cleaning, repairing and repainting the house during Advent, the four weeks before Christmas, has a practical consequence for curtains: fresh paint needs time before fabric goes back against it. Emulsion that feels dry to the touch after an hour is still curing for days, and fabric pressed against it can pick up colour or stick.

Allow a few days between the last coat and rehanging, longer in a room with poor ventilation. Keep windows open in the meantime, which also clears the smell of paint before it settles into curtains and upholstery. Fabric absorbs odours readily, and paint smell can linger in a heavy curtain for weeks.

Traditional finishes behave differently from modern emulsions. Limewash and some distempers leave a chalky surface that rubs off onto anything touching the wall. In a house finished that way, curtains that brush the wall at the returns or the hem will mark, so it is worth hanging them a little clear of the surface.

The star lantern hung outside the house, usually paper stretched over a light frame and lit from inside, is one of the most recognisable signs of a Goan Christmas. Many families also run strings of lights along the veranda, around windows and across the front of the house. Many are hung at the veranda or at a front window, close to where curtains hang inside.

Where lights are fixed around a window or along a curtain pole, keep the fittings, plugs and transformers off the fabric, and use lights rated for the location. Outdoor sets on a veranda face the evening dew and, near the sea, salt, so indoor lights pressed into outdoor use are a poor idea.

The same care applies to candles. Advent wreaths and candles on window sills look lovely against a curtain and are a real risk if the fabric can move. Tie curtains well clear of any flame and check the room with fans running, because a light sheer can swing further than it appears.

Family returning for Christmas often means opening bedrooms that have been lightly used for much of the year. Those rooms deserve a look in November: curtains that stayed up through the monsoon may have marked on the wall side, and a room kept closed may smell musty even after the rains have finished.

Travellers arriving from other time zones will often sleep at odd hours, and a guest room that lets in the first light around the edges of a curtain makes that harder. Blackout linings help, but the geometry matters more: curtains wide enough to overlap the frame, high enough to cover the top, and returned to the wall at the sides.

If the spare room is also where suitcases, extra bedding and gifts are kept through December, keep fabric off the floor and give the room some airflow each day. Even in the dry season, a small room crowded with people and belongings becomes humid quickly. A few minutes with the window open each morning is usually enough.

The platter of Christmas sweets known as kuswar, sent to neighbours and offered to visitors, means that many Goan kitchens are unusually busy in December. Sweets are fried, stirred and baked over days, and the heat, steam and oil from that cooking travel further through the house than people expect.

Kitchen curtains take the worst of it. A fabric curtain near a stove collects a film of oil that attracts dust and is hard to wash out, and it is also a fire risk if it can reach the flame. A wipe-clean blind, or a short curtain well away from the hob, is the practical answer for a working kitchen.

In the dining room and front room, the same oil and sugar end up on table linen, cushions and upholstery as sweets are passed around. Washable covers and runners that can go in the machine after the holidays are worth more than fine fabrics that need careful cleaning. A runner that goes in the machine can be clean again by the next visitor.

December is one of the best months of the year for fabric care. Afternoon relative humidity in the state capital averages under 60 per cent, rain is rare, and washed curtains dry in a day. It is the one festival in the Goan calendar where the weather works entirely in favour of the preparations.

That also makes early January a good time for a proper clean-up. Once the visitors have gone, wash the table linen, cushion covers and any sheers that took smoke from candles or cooking, and store festive textiles clean and dry rather than putting them away as they are. Dry January weather makes this quick; the same job in June would take a week.

Anything stored should go somewhere ventilated rather than sealed in plastic, because it will sit through the next monsoon before it comes out again. A festive runner put away with a sugar stain in January can be a mildewed one by the following December. A cotton bag or a loosely folded pile on an open shelf is far better than a sealed box.