Eid Saeed
November 04, 2005
So...I dislike and dread Eid (the post-Ramadan holiday) only slightly less than I do weddings. I don't know why this is. All I know is that I'd rather have another two weeks of Ramadan than have to put up with the first day of Eid. My sister tried to ban me from going with her to the Eid prayer this morning cause of the attitude I get towards other Eid-prayer-goers, but instead settled for making me promise to just shut up until we got home. I *almost* made it all the way through without making a single snarky comment about the supposedly holy crowd, who in their zeal to repeat after the imam somehow forget to be nice to their fellow Muslims. I held my tongue until some middle-aged lady started panicking and pushing through the crowd and yelling at everyone to line up for prayer because it was starting, at which point I couldn't take it anymore and said, "Well, if you were so worried about making it to the prayer on time, why didn't you get here earlier?" much to the mortification of my mother.
We got through it though.
And we got through the visits to all 500 hundred of my closest relatives. I LOVE MY FAMILY, just...not all at once, and at such high levels of excitement. After the prayer we went to my gran's house, then off to my dad's two youngest sister's houses, where we stuffed our selves with cookies and tea. And then it was off to my father's village in the Nile delta area, where my aunt tried to force way too much food down our throats, and where I actually heard someone say "Ya Khalil, rakant al humar feyn?", or, "Hey Khalil, where did you park the donkey?"
So, ok, it wasn't that bad actually. I always dread Eid, and then at the end of the day wonder why I dread it so much. There is only one part of Eid that I really look forward to, and it is the tradition my mother and I have of staying up late the night before Eid to make the delicious Eid butter cookies for which my mom is famous. This little tradition began informally about 13 years ago when my mother wanted to find a way to keep me up all night so that I would be sleepy for a brain scan (what's it called?) I had to do the next morning. It just so happened that the next morning was also Eid, so my mother made up about 5 kgs of dough, and we stayed up all night making enough cookies to feed all of New Jersey's Muslim population, as Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and various other movies played in the background.
This year I was in charge of making the little sesame sugar balls that are the filling for the Eid cookie (also called "kahk") -
Mom made the dough and made ridges in the cookies, which is both for decoration and to make the powdered sugar stick -
After pulling them out of the oven, my sister was apparently in charge of arranging them in a smiley face formation -
And smothering them in powdered sugar -
Bon Apetit! And Eid Mubarak!
