A Moroccan Christmas Eve

Having turned in the last of my grades yesterday and thus put an end to my busiest semester yet, I slept in this Christmas Eve morning. After a lazy breakfast and some quality Internet time I made my way out to the corner café for a nis-nis, the Moroccan café au lait. After an hour reading the special Christmas issue of The Economist and a bit from Gary Shteyngart's Absurdistan, I took a walk around my neighborhood.

Today is a normal Friday in Morocco. Sometime after noon, schoolchildren headed home for couscous. One by one, the shops closed. The mosques filled up and emptied. The schoolchildren are now joking and tussling outside the school gates. Friday afternoon classes will begin shortly. Some shops will open up again; many won't. But that's because it's Friday, the Islamic sabbath, not because it's Christmas Eve.

No, it's not beginning to feel a lot like Christmas here; it's not even coming close. Other than a few upscale shops and supermarkets (in Morocco supermarkets are upscale), there are no signs of Christmas. Even there, decorations are limited to Christmas trees and a few garlands. The same mix of Arabic and Western music plays in cafés and shops and offices. There are no non-stop Christmas music stations.

I miss our American Christmas season. I didn't think that I would, but I do some. I admit: to compensate, I've been streaming Big R Radio: Christmas Classics on iTunes almost every day. I bought a cheap artificial tree, and I even made some of my students learn the chorus and first verse of "Jingle Bells".

Trying to concisely explain Christmas to my students has been difficult. They're more familiar with the Christmas tree and gift-giving from movies and TV shows. As with other American styles and customs, some Moroccan families have taken to imitating they see in American media. The girl working at the supermarket checkout assured me that she celebrated Christmas too--they have a tree and give gifts.

This will be my first non-commercialized Christmas. The massive cultural consumption, holiday spectacles, and suffocatingly festive atmosphere are stripped away from the holiday. All that remains is a yearning for some of my family's traditions and the Advent liturgy I hear in church each week.

I've tried to imitate what my family does as best as possible in this new environment. I have a tree. I baked a few of my mom's Christmas cookies. Tomorrow morning I'll have the same egg dish with a side of grapefruit we always eat.

And then there is the Advent season. Scholars tell us Jesus wasn't born in December. Christmas trees, stockings, and Santa Claus do not appear in the gospel accounts of Jesus' birth. Theoretically there could be Christianity with absolutely no Christmas.

But it does exist. We have this strange accumulation of customs and stories (what do a fantasy prince who cracks nuts in his extra time or a marginalized reindeer with a bright red nose really have to do with the Incarnation anyway?) They're part of being an American Christian. I grew up with them. As strange as they are and as much as I struggle to explain and justify them all to inquiring Moroccans, they are mine.

And this year I have been even more conscious that something else that is mine is this Advent season--the time Christians have chosen to reflect in anticipation on the event of God becoming man to save us all from Satan's snare when we were gone astray. It didn't have to be that way, but it is. And I am a part of it. I maybe can't justify all the consumerism of the Christmas season, but the act of giving gifts to loved ones mirrors what the Wise men did with Jesus. And if done in the right way, it fulfills what the apostle John said about the Incarnation's effect on us, "We love because He first loved us."

So, later this afternoon I will head out to try to live out that ideal while sharing my culture and tradition some: I will take some Christmas cookies to my Moroccan neighbors and friends. And after that I will go to church for the culmination of this season of Advent anticipation.

Christmas Music

When something important in the United States is happening, I try to mention it to my students, for both my sake and theirs. For their sake: because I want them to get a fuller view of American culture. For my sake: because sometimes I feel disconnected.

The past week or so, I have been trying to get in the Christmas mood by listening to Christmas carols. Usually about this time in the season, I'm annoyed to death with the incessant Christmas carols, but this year Christmas is anything but all around.

On Wednesday, I mentioned Christmas carols to my class of 11 and 12-year olds. One of them asked me to play a song or two for them. I readily obliged.

These kids hear a heavy dose of American rock and R&B, along with smatterings of French music, Arabic pop music, and more traditional Arabic music. It never occurred to me how different Christmas carols sound compared to American pop music, but one of my 11-year olds complained right away.

"This is terrible!"

I responded, "It's not suppose to be pop music. Do you like Eid al Kabir music and listen to it all the time?"

He lowered his head, "Uh...no."

Now, I feel a little bit deceptive. The entire week I have done nothing but listen to Christmas carols...

A Moroccan Thanksgiving

Last Tuesday I got a hankering for a good ole-fashioned Thanksgiving. So I sent out some text messages to my American friends inquiring about interest for the holiday. As it turned out, everyone wanted to celebrate it and was willing to help out. So we divided up the dishes amongst ourselves. Somehow I ended up with the turkey and the stuffing. We all had to work Thursday evening, so we decided to make it a lunch Thanksgiving. We also decided to try to share our culture, and so we invited five Moroccan friends.

On Wednesday night I went to the grocery store to look for turkey. The butcher told me if I wanted a whole turkey, I had to request it at least two or three days in advance.

The super market is only good for a few things here; it's better to go to the open air market for most things or even the "hanuts", smaller stores located on every block that sell all the staples. So after getting the turkey at the supermarket, I wandered down the street to the market and picked up some vegetables and spices.

I got up early on Thursday morning. After a quick breakfast, I cleaned up a bit and arranged the tables so we could all sit together. I wrote on our whiteboard: "Happy Thanksgiving! I am thankful for..." in both English and Arabic and left plenty of space for others to write as well.

Then I turned my attention to cooking. The preparation of the turkey and stuffing took a while, but eventually everything made its way into the oven. I have a better appreciation for what my mom does every year now...

I took a shower and waited around. Even though we had agreed upon noon, there were still no guests at 12:45. But then a Moroccan showed up. A little later an American. And then around 1, the last six guests showed up all at once.

We couldn't start just yet; we still had to make the gravy. The turkey had produced much more juice than I had thought it would since it wasn't the full thing. We poured it into a sauce pan, added a little flour, and in no time we had gravy. I gave a brief explanation of Thanksgiving and a blessing and we dug in.
After dinner, we cleaned up a bit and then had apple crumble (the logistics of pumpkin pie were too difficult). And then by popular demand, Daniel pulled out his guitar and gave us a mini-concert.



At various points, the Americans among us left to the other room to talk to relatives on Skype. After my turn, I emerged from my room to find all of the dishes miraculously done and the furniture re-arranged.

Not very long afterwards, people started filtering out. I took a short nap and then got ready for a work.

No football and no real day off, but Thanksgiving nonetheless.

A Moroccan Halloween

Transferring a holiday from one culture to another can often be an easy task. When I lived in France a few years ago, I threw a Thanksgiving feast for over 40 people, complementing the turkey and mashed potatoes with French baguettes, wine, and cheese. However, it is not always that simple, as Daniel and I discovered last weekend.

We had some concerns beforehand and so we discussed them with our Moroccan friends. Specifically, the neighbors had previously complained about noise after 11 PM, so we decided to start at 6 PM and go until 11 PM, rather than having a typical American party which might start at 9 PM and go until the early hours of the morning. We were also concerned about who would come. We didn't know very many people, and so we asked our friends to bring some of their friends and coworkers. We were hoping to meet some people our age, particularly females (who are often almost impossible to meet).

Saturday afternoon before the party, Daniel and I bought some candy, snacks, and drinks at the supermarket, and then we cleaned the house. I headed off to the Franciscan church for All Saint's mass. On the way out, I explained to the concierge that there would be some people would be visiting because it was an American holiday. My anxious explanation was met with the typical Arabic greeting on a holiday, mabruk, which basically means "congratulations". I tried to explain that it's not really a holiday you say "mabruk", but I don't think I got my point across. It's hard to explain the idea of a commercialized holiday to someone who has never really experienced it.

The Franciscan Church is the only Christian church in town, and so I have been trying to go when I have the chance. I have met the priests, who work at a mission in the medina teaching languages, and the few older French people who attend on Saturday nights (on Sunday morning a large number of sub-Saharan African students at the University of Meknes attend). The oldest priest in this Franciscan province gave the homily. He has been in Morocco since before Vatican II and before the end of colonialism. In those days, they mainly provided hospital care, because the local health care was so poor. But now it is much better, so they have moved into education, particularly language education. As he spoke of the Beatitudes (one of the readings) and living them out to the end, they took on a new meaning for me.

When I arrived back home, there were about 12 people in our empty living area: five Americans, our five Moroccan friends, and two Moroccans I had not met before. The one Moroccan who had promised to bring a number of his fellow students was busy drinking, seemingly oblivious to the disparity between what had been promised and the reality. The American girls had made Halloween signs, so I spent my first few minutes at the party putting them up.

Later Daniel and I started poking fun at him for it, and he responded defensively, "You don't know how hard it is to get people to come to something like this in this country!! Girls can't come out to houses their families don't know. A lot of the students went home for the weekend."

Around nine, about half of the people (including all the girls) left the party. The few of us who remained ended up turning to serious topics: the lack of jobs in Morocco and what we Americans thought of Islam. They left sometime before midnight and Daniel and I went to bed.

I would say that it was the most boring party I have ever thrown, but on Tuesday a spark of excitement was inserted into the party after the fact. I was reading a local magazine when I stumbled across a photo of one of the Moroccans who had come to the party. It was a reproduction of the cover of this week's Paris Match (more or less the French equivalent of People) with Rachid Dati, the former French minister of justice who is of Moroccan descent, along with a rap group from Meknes. The rapper who was second from the right in the picture had stopped by our party for half an hour to hang out and pick up his American girlfriend.

So, out of the ruins of perhaps the worst party I have ever thrown, I can snatch the claim that a celebrity came. I can't say that about any of my previous parties. No one who ever appeared on a magazine cover came to my parties in the United States or in France.