My First Merry Muslim Christmas
After years of begging my parents to celebrate Jesus’s jolly birthday, I finally got the log cabin Christmas of my American Muslim dreams.
Christmas while Muslim was the pits. As an Iranian kid who spent the first half of kindergarten in ESL (English as a Second Language), I didn’t learn the word “Christmas” until I was fluent enough to enter “regular” kindergarten. All the kids in class were singing about a man with a big white beard and robe and hat; he looked a lot like Ayatollah Khomeini to me, but his name was Santa Claus. They said he lived at the North Pole, and spent the year judging children. “He sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake.” The lyrics scared me so much that the teacher took me aside and reassured me that Santa wasn’t real. Furious that she was lying to children, I exposed her secret and made everyone cry, including the teacher. She sent me to the principal’s office, where I got a stern lecture about respecting other people’s beliefs. Lucky for me, in addition to English and Persian, I also spoke adult, so I clarified: “Mr. Principal, we believe the same things. Muslims believe in Jesus. But Santa is a lie! Only Allah can say who’s good or bad. If circle time is share time, then why can’t I share that?”
Mr. Principal quarantined me and called my parents to seek some assurance that I wouldn’t go around ruining Christmas for all of Los Angeles. When Mom and Dad showed up, they thanked him and promised that they would talk to me.
On the car ride home, I simmered in the backseat while my baby brother, Ace, cooed and my preschool sister, Ellie, mumbled carols while sucking on a Santa-shaped lollipop.
“Stop singing!” I snapped at Ellie. “Santa’s not real.”
“Zahra, that’s not nice!” Mom said. “Santa Claus is just a story. In America, everyone celebrates their own stories. We just don’t celebrate this particular one.”
I burst into tears. “Why can’t Santa be our story too? If we celebrate Christmas, then we get to bring a whole tree in the house!” I said, wiping my face with my skirt.
Ellie cried with me, and even Ace joined in. We started kicking against the backs of my parents’ seats, screaming “We believe in Santa!” until Dad yelled, “ZAHRA!”
It was never good when either of my parents yelled my name like a sentence. When dad pulled over, he turned around and said, “Hey, man,” which he always said when he wanted to level with me, “don’t wait for pretend men in stories to get you presents. Come on! Get a PhD! Then you can get presents for yourself every day!” My Dad had two PhDs, but I never once saw him with presents.
When I was in second grade, my family moved to the Bay Area, and I got a fresh start as the cool kid who knew the truth about Santa. But after a while, being the odd one out wore on me. Christmas was the one day when I missed my parents the most and our family felt the smallest. In 1978, when the Iranian Revolution broke out, Mom and Dad were just Afrooz and Abas, college kids stranded at the University of Michigan without any way of contacting their families. Their parents, brothers, sisters, aunts, and uncles were still in Iran, and sanctions made it impossible for my relatives to leave Iran and meet us anywhere else. I didn’t meet my extended family until I was 14. Christmas wasn’t just a day without presents; it was a day that reminded us we were without our family.
Even at home, our Muslim Iranian household felt like an isolated, embargoed country. While non-religious Persian friends and the neighborhood kids tore open presents, we endured the Macy’s Day Parade, watching two-story Santa balloons float along the longest street on what felt like the longest day of the year. Everyone but my parents got the message to quit working. I thought they never hosted or attended a Christmas party because they didn’t approve of assimilation, but looking back I think they couldn’t afford to want to celebrate. It was their one shot to work overtime and get ahead of the competition, and they did. Eventually, they bought a new house in an affluent Bay Area suburb and Mom got her own car, but Christmas was still the pits.
By the time I turned fifteen, I was appointed resident babysitter, and Winter Break became my resume builder as a powerless middle manager. While my parents worked their butts off for that sweet holiday overtime pay, my siblings and I became seasoned strategists.
One afternoon we decided to manifest our own Christmas. We gathered fallen pine branches and leaves from a patch of wilderness near a creek behind our cul-de-sac to create custom wreaths and garland. When we heard the garage door open that night, we proudly charged at Mom and Dad with our hideous wilderness decor, but they had a bigger surprise in tow.
They stood in the driveway, hands full of shopping bags, beaming, like they’d been riding with Rudolph himself. After a decade of working holidays and sick days, they’d managed to accrue enough time off to take us to Lake Tahoe to spend Winter Break in a real-life log cabin in the snow. They had scavenged REIs and crafts stores to put it all together. We had a toboggan, long johns with the butt flap just like in the cartoons, and s’mores with gelatin-free marshmallows. Dad put on Jack Frost’s felt top hat and Mom wiggled a carrot in front of her nose. “Pack your bags, man!” Dad said. “We’re gonna build a snowman!”
Ellie and I chucked our decaying wilderness wreaths and our Nirvana ’90s apathy. We jumped up and down and squealed. Christmas in a log cabin was the pinnacle of American Christmas cosplay. We were obsessed with Little House on the Prairie, and while we packed, we kept flipping its pages for illustrations, noting supplies. We’d definitely need flannel.
“Pa,” I said in the parlance of Prairie, “I reckon you’ll need flannel to stay warm through winter.” Ma shot back, “I reckon you California girls are gonna freeze your butts off if you don’t wear the right clothes!” I didn’t believe her when she told us that snow is wet and we’d need waterproof clothes, because in all the holiday movies we’d watched since kindergarten, snow was soft and pillowy. That’s why Santa had red cheeks, from basking in the company of all that charming warm snow.
The next morning, we piled into the car and embarked on the three-hour road trip to Tahoe, a purple minivan full of Persians decked in flannel. We bragged about how big a snowman we’d make, how many s’mores we’d eat, and how fast a toboggan could go. We taught Ma and Pa all the lyrics to Bart Simpson’s “Jingle Bells,” and debated our individual itineraries. Ace, whose Arabic name, Eesa is the translation of the name Jesus, felt it was only right that we should celebrate the birthday of his namesake, and wanted to perform as Jesus in a nativity scene. Ellie insisted that we should first play Sexy Spies, which made Mom and Dad do a double-take and nearly crash the car. After a few cautious questions, they realized our made-up game was just hide-and-seek mixed in with some feminist attitude. Every TV show we’d been raised on, from Charlie’s Angels to Hart to Hart, had strong female characters who snooped with sultry eyes and no-nonsense moves, like “Whack! Bang! Pow! Bet that hurt you good” roundhouse kicks. We went back to singing “Jingle bells! Batman smells!” and when the landscape came into view, we fell silent, staring at the mountains draped in heaps of white snow, speckled with pines and firs.
The cabin was exactly as I’d imagined — notched at the corners, just like we’d learned about in elementary school. It had a triangle roof to help the snow slide off, logs stacked outside, and a ribbon of glistening icicles along the eaves. Inside was cold as a freezer box, with electric heaters ready to roast each room, and one wood-burning Benjamin Franklin stove in the common area, ready for Halal s’more making.
Ellie and I slinked through each room as Sexy Spies. We skulked around in our flannel, surveyed the space, and took pictures with our Kodak FunSaver cameras — just like Laura Ingalls Wilder would’ve done. Then Ellie froze in a hormonal daze when she spied a Marty McFly-looking guy just a porch away at the cabin next door. She shot me a look that said, “Spy on that, right?” and I shot her a look back that said, “I don’t know that I’m queer yet.” I had crushes on movie star boys, like Zach the Lego Maniac, but I was more of a “If I could get a grind-fest going with Grimace and the Hamburglar, that’d be something to spy on” kind of girl.
The next morning, we headed to the ski resort for a full day of snowboarding. I told Mom that I’d worn my butt-flap long johns, but I hadn’t, because it’s impossible to pee in them! Instead, I layered up with all the clothes in my suitcase. I topped my hound-dog-patterned flannel boxers with flannel pajamas, a pair of jeans, and sweats, and then took care of my “wet snow” worries with water-resistant pants and a windbreaker. I trudged out of the ski lodge in my DIY ensemble, snowboard in hand, ready to dive into all those blankets of frozen wet wonder.
As soon as I got started, my center of gravity betrayed me. I fell getting on the ski lift, I fell getting off it, and I fell all the way down the incline. As soon as I’d get the hang of it, I’d gain way more speed than I was ready to manage. But I kept trying, and on my last ride down, I managed to find a groove and gained speed. I saw everyone cheering me on at the bottom; even Ma, Pa, Ellie, and Ace were there. I threw my hands up like a surfing rockstar and yelled, “Merry Christmas, everybody!” As I soared past the fam, I heard them say, “Your pants!” I looked down. All four layers of pants, flannel, jeans, and sweats, had slid down to my boots. I was so cold and wet, I hadn’t noticed. My hound dog boxers gave the members of the Heavenly Ski Resort a very merry closing. Back in the mini-van I Grinch-snortled when Ma gave me her “I did reckon” smirk. I had to hand it to Old Saint Nick. It took a lot of jolly to enjoy the snow.
On Christmas Eve, we toasted s’mores in the Ben Franklin stove and watched Ace’s nativity scene and applauded his “other birthday” in Palestine. On Christmas Day, snowflakes fell like delicate kisses from the sky. All of us were too sore from snowboarding to do much but gaze out the window and watch them collect in shimmering heaps that’d soon become our snowman. From long johns to wood-burning stoves, to Sexy Spies who snoop with sultry eyes to the cute McFly next door, we got the merry Muslim Christmas we’d waited years to celebrate together.
About the author: Zahra Noorbakhsh is an award-winning comedian and cohost of the #GoodMuslimBadMuslim podcast, featured in Oprah Magazine. She is the Pop Culture Collaborative’s Senior Fellow on Comedy for Social Change. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
