Kochi: With just a day left for Christmas, the city has plunged deep into a celebratory mood, eating out, visiting the houses of friends and relatives for get-togethers and going to the movies and picnic spots. The most interesting feature of this year’s celebration is an outing to the malls by almost every citizen.
Five malls dot the city now, two of which including Asia’s largest mall, the Lulu Mall, are celebrating Christmas for the first time. The other newcomer is the Central Mall on MG Road. Three old malls, the Oberon Mall, the Gold Souk and the Abad Nucleas Mall at Tripunithura are also leaving no stone unturned to make the festivities grand.
Santas are everywhere and they play with children visiting with their parents. There are cribs and Christmas trees and stars in different colours as well. The famed Cochin Carnival also has started in Fort Kochi.
Students of a few architecture colleges have made their Christmas even more colourful by organizing fairs at the malls and other haunts. After conducting such a fair in the past two days at Marine Drive, the students of Holy Crescent College of Architecture, Aluva, are holding a fair on the ground floor of Central Mall.
“We have created 700 Christmas cards at a time when wishes are passed through emails. We want to once again popularize the old cards. All of them are the art works made by us. There are many other works like jewel boxes, lamp shades, ear rings etc made out of junk materials on display,” says Hanwin, one of the 40 students who worked for one month to create the artworks.
