Awesomest Eid Ever

We are on day 3 of Eid Al-Adha, but really wrapping it up because tomorrow's a monday and we'll be back at work. Normally, we end up celebraiting Eid for a day because it's too hard to take more time off, or we're travelling to and from Ottawa or TO, but this Eid, this Eid was different. My parents were coming to Montreal, M's parents and brother were also coming, and my younger sister's in-laws were also in town. Basically, we celebrated in true family style, as-in a bunch of people around an extended table, elbows pressed together, laughter and conversation and ladels being passed from person to person to person. The food was delicious and the company even more so.
It was such a success that M and I (and my younger sister and her hubby) are all insisting that there must be one communal Montreal-style Eid each year.
Repeat, for sure!

Family Evolution

When I was a child, my family in Canada consisted of my parents and sisters; the closest relatives we had were an uncle in the U.S. that we saw on occasion and his family. We took trips to Egypt to visit extended family every few years, but in reality we made family in Ottawa to compensate. I think back over my childhood - all the way up to university - and lose count of the "aunts" who became my aunts, the girls my age who acted as substitute cousins. These were the people we spent our special occasions with: the people we saw during Eid and Ramadan and grew up around. In some ways, they were more than family, because we had chosen each other; in other ways, they would never really be family, and we each had our distinct, nuclear units because at the end of the day, we only had a certain common history, and no common blood.
I remember my excitement when my mother's youngest brother moved to Ottawa, how absolutely thrilled I was that I could start a story with "my uncle" at school, and really, truly mean "my uncle" and not a friend of the family. I remember how thrilled I was when my baby cousin was born and I had an actual cousin to play with and coo at within driving distance. In some bizarre way, the presence of relatives in the city validated Ottawa as my home. I had family here, close by.

Over the years, it became normal. My Canadian family grew as more cousins and second cousins made the move. Eid became a celebration at our house where, instead of my parents trying to find a way to surround us with company, we tried to figure out how to seat everyone around the table. My parents' house became the "family house", the house where everyone came together for events and holidays, the equivalent of my grandparents' house with the massive veranda in Alexandria. When my sisters got married, the family grew again in the form of brothers and their families. Until that point, my only experience with brothers was through my male cousins, who played rough with us and pushed us in sports and up trees on our visits to Egypt. Two cousins in particular served as my older brothers, teasing and joking with us through out the years. As they got older, they would come to North America to work in the summers, and then stop by Ottawa to visit for a couple of weeks before they returned for the fall semester.

Eventually, the older one moved to Ottawa; two months ago, the younger one moved to Toronto. Last night, he and his family came to visit at my in-laws' place, where we're visiting in TO for the long weekend. There was something remarkably unremarkable about looking around the living room, seeing M and his family and my "original older brother" and his family there all in one place, a new family extension forming. 

When I was little, I could count on one hand my extended family in north america. At one point, I couldn't even do that. I now need both hands and feet to do it, and I love it.

Juliette et "Wow"! (or 'Must Love Chocolate')

Coming to Montreal soon? Want somewhere to majorly overindulge your chocolate addiction? I've got just the place for you: Juliette et Chocolat on St. Denis. As good as advertised (and I don't get paid for this, swear...)

'nuff said..

Eid Mubarak!

It's 20 below today in Montreal, for the first day of Eid Ul-Adha (makes me think of a Christmas song that starts with "Oh the weather outside is frightful...").
On this Eid, my sisters are
a) here with me in Montreal enduring the same temperatures,
b) in sunny California with my parents, or
c) in Egypt, praying the congregational Eid prayer in an outdoor field along with most of her husband's family's town.

We've been on an email streak for a couple of days, the entire family (4 sisters, 4 brothers by marriage, 2 parents), starting with discussion of funny things my little Angela's done recently and into "Happy Eid" exchanges, and what everyone will be doing. The Montreal crew? We'll be gorging on chocolate... (There's this place we've been meaning to try forever, and we figured a huge celebratory day is as good a time as any. I have book buying plans too, thanks to a bunch of recent exchanges with my favourite bookworm buddy about good reads - Glass Castle, March, here I come).

This year, I've truly been feeling the "internationalness" of the family. Everyone is everywhere, and yet with the Internet and phones and texting and VoIP being what they are today, I feel like we're all in the same place. I'm loving the stories from overseas and down-under (as we jokingly refer to Cali), and I'm loving being able to hear them so frequently.

Eid Mubarak to everyone, wherever you might be!

Little Angelas Love to Play

So, as promised, here is the story of how my Little Angela spent her first Eid in a faraway land named Dubai:
To start, let me give some background about how we tend to do Eid when we live as a minority, i.e. in Canada or the U.S. The community focus in this case tends to be about making it special for the little kids. Since the rest of the world is going about their day-to-day business and there are no pretty lights in the street or Santa's in the malls, we do everything we can to make little kids feel like it's a special day. Also, since most of the Muslim population in Canada or the U.S. is living far away from their immediate,or at least extended, family, visiting family is replaced with community get-togethers.
When I was little, we had some very good friends who would have a 'Eid Open House' party every year, and just about the whole Ottawa Muslim community would end up at Uncle Sulayman and Aunt Rafi's house at some point during the course of the day,and we'd eat tons of roti and cake and play on the swings in backyard. Now, whereas I had loads of fun, I can imagine the day was always exhausting for Aunt Rafi and Uncle Sulayman. Eventually, this activity shifted to renting the hall where the Eid prayer took place in the morning for the remainder of the remainder of the day so the families could all visit their together without anyone's house getting taken over (plus the community was really becoming enormous), and different community associations would take on the task of running games for the kids and arranging for yummy food and every other thing you'd want to have around at Eid.
What this means is that, when Little Angela was born almost three years ago, her Eid celebration included a pile of presents and new clothes and yummy food, but also that immediately following Eid prayer in the morning, the hall was transformed into a child's version of heaven, with circus games and magic shows and balloons and those crazy blowup castles with slides that kids love so much,and Little Angela would spend all day running around and playing and looking and doing everything her little heart desired until she fell asleep from sheer exhaustion, and this was Eid...
Now, in the middle-East, where just about everyone's in on it and the streets are decorated and everyone gets the three days off work, Eid tends to go more like this: they do the new clothes and lots of candy and presents thing too, but they go to the prayer as a family in a mosque, not a rented hall, and then they go to visit family and close friends and just generally spend the day together... no day-long child's heaven circus included.
Little Angela was devastated. Where was her beloved Eid? Balloon's? Blowup Castles? Magician's? Animals? My understanding is that the poor thing cried and that eventually they took her to a kids playground (in doors of course, the heat is brutal), and my brother in law ended up gathering all the kids around and telling them a story, and then invited Little Angela to join in the storytelling. Which she did. For a few seconds. Before she decided she'd rather sing ABCDEFG to her delighted audience of children...
Good God, I miss that child.

Meaningful Gifts

There's a beautiful (and very short) Prophetic saying that encourages gift giving as a form of getting closer. In Arabic, it's "Tahaadu, Tahabbu", which essentially means "give gifts to one another and you will love one another".
It's very simple, and obviously it alone will not make people love one another, but I think it shows how much gifts mean to us as humans. We like being showered with attention and love. We like being given something we weren't expecting, and we like the feeling of knowing someone has thought about us and though about how best to make us happy. All of these are results of being given a gift.
At the same time, I think we've reached a point where sometimes gift giving is taken too far. Sometimes we seem to exchange gifts because it's what's expected, and not because there's actually any love, or need in the exchange. How many of us have spent hours trying to look for something to buy a loved one because an occasion like Eid or Christmas or their birthday is coming up, and they don't really need or want anything? How many of us have ended up buying them something that just sat there just to have bought them a present? I personally would rather get flowers, or a chocolate bar, or a phone call, or sit together and watch a movie then get something I don't need. These are all gifts too, and show that the person who gave them to you remembers and cares.
I heard about another great way of gift giving on the radio this morning. Both Green Peace and the CHF (another great Canadian non-profit) have these programs set up where you can buy a gift on behalf of a family member or friend to either send valuable food stock, or animals, or medical supplies like malaria kits to people in need around the world, or sponsor specific green peace projects. Both of these groups have a catalogue so you can pick the exact gift you want to give, and go with the cause closest to your heart or to whomever you're buying for.
And think how much more valuable contributions to an environmental project, or chicks, or fertilizer, will be to those who need it and to the earth, than a knick knack that sits on your friend's shelf collecting dust until she/he finally decides to donate it to the Goodwill or throw it out.
You can apply the idea to any cause you want by picking an organization that does good humanitarian or environmental work and then donating on behalf of a friend as your gift. Human Concern International is a great option, so's IRFAN-Canada (both are humanitarian groups that provide orphan sponsorship and medical and sustainable supplies in war-ravaged regions of the world).
So if you're stuck for what to buy and still behind on your Christmas shopping and starting to panic, or if you haven't gotten Eid gifts yet for some important people, and it's just hitting you that Eid's about to end, try something like this. It'll make you, and the person you're buying for, feel great.