by: Zahra Daya
“Trick-or-treating?” Mum echoed, eyebrows swooping. Her fist clenched and unclenched beneath the glass dining table. Her Arabic accent tinged the ‘r’s’ with throatiness.
“Yes, Mama,” I replied in Arabic, hoping this would appease her. “Trick-or-treating. You know, when kids get all dressed up and get candy from the neighborhood?”
“Ai! You mean the devil’s holiday!”
I fidget with a loose thread on my shirt, knowing any response would be a bad one right now.
“You want to look like a witch and get poisoned by strangers!” she continues in Arabic, eyes popping with threat now. “Maybe paint your nails purple?”
“I’ll go with Ahmed,” I say, hoping she’ll let me go with my brother.
Mama clucks her tongue and turns back to the stove, turning over the sizzling meat. “I make you nutritious meals at home and still you want to eat candy,” she mutters to herself.
I shake my head despairingly, leave the kitchen and tread over our sacred turquoise rug, the tassels tickling my toes. Out the window, there are no pumpkins in sight, no spooky halloween decorations. After all, I remind myself, this is the Middle East.
Back in America, my aunt used to decorate our house elaborately; pumpkins rested snugly in every corner of the room, imitation cobwebs hung on the ceiling with tenuous Scotch tape, skeletons greeted guests with fixed smiles at every door, and best of all, the aroma of pumpkin spice wafted through the halls, plaster walls infused with festivity. On Halloween night, a fat bowl of swirled colors and shapes would sit near the front door, often a candy or two missing before the clock struck dark, my tummy growling for more.
“Go, go, and may you never be tricked,” my Aunt used to say, fluorescent orange lips pulled into a smile. She knew how much this meant to me. In retrospect, it wasn’t just a simple fact of the novelty in getting free candy from the neighborhood, or dressing up, or even the freedom of it.
It was her way of allowing me to assimilate, pulling back one more curtain between my culturally-rich traditional life, and American life: a culture that was sure to only keep lightweight traditions at heart. Maybe she did it unknowingly, because when I was returned to my mother, she got the brunt of the lectures.
I’d bound out of the door, candy basket swung merrily on my arm, bumping into my hip. Our next-door-neighbors were a happy middle-aged couple, whiter than any skin I’d seen, but brimming with stories from the ‘80s. They greeted me with exaggerated ‘Ooh’’s and cracked knees to bend to admire my dress up close. It was a lazy lump of a dress: the skirt comprised of erratic strips of fuzzy purple fabric, then a silky neon pink, a coarse green. Thrown together hastily by my aunt, finished with decorations and sparkles, but I suppose that’s what halloween was, anyway: a mix of rumors and whispers from all corners of the world, stitched cleverly together by the hand of capitalism, sold with glitter and excitement. Of course, I was oblivious to this back then, my stockinged feet as staunch as my mind.
We circled the neighbourhood on feet and excitement, tone gradually rising to a crescendo with each candy I popped in my mouth. We came home that night exhausted but happy, resolving to feast the next day. The candy lasted months, but it wasn’t about that.
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