We arrived in the Emirates almost exactly a year ago, although yesterday I caught myself saying we’d been here for a year and a half (I am not very good at math, but even I realize that that twenty-day overlap does not let you round up by six months). For a long time after we arrived, I felt terrible.
Malaise, I think you’d call it. Everything I ate made me sick, bedbugs munched on my neck every night, the shower water turned my hair into a fine, brittle assembly of straws. I had a constant nosebleed from the change in climate, and my toes ached. None of these things were enough to make me throw in the towel and drag my family home to the States, or even go to the hospital and get checked out for any of the various diseases I was sure were causing my symptoms; I just felt mildly terrible for a few weeks. Then, around the Chinese New Year, I realized suddenly that I felt fine again. And I continued to feel fine right up until May or so, and the onset of morning sickness.
Anyway, I just realized the other day that the sad, heavy, achy feeling I had last fall is coming back. This time, though, I think I know what’s causing it: Missing Holiday Syndrome.
It started just after Halloween, a holiday which nobody outside North America celebrates.
“What is the meaning behind Halloween?” one of Sweetie’s coworkers asked me once. So I explained about All Saints’ Day, and scaring away the bad spirits by disguising yourself, and candy corn and carved pumpkins. I did a really terrible job, but he listened politely all the way through. “Here,” he said when I had trailed off in midsentence while trying to describe bobbing for apples, “we do not have a similar holiday.”
I miss Halloween.
No, what I really miss is: fall weather, lumpy borrowed sweaters, lit candles inside poorly carved pumpkins, the muddy, leafy, cold smell an October rain leaves behind.
Then there’s Thanksgiving, another holiday only celebrated in America; another holiday that only makes sense in America. Try explaining Pilgrims and Indians, starvation and Plimouth Plantation, turkey and mincemeat and yams cooked with tiny white marshmallows, to someone who didn’t grow up in America, and prepare to confuse yourself. Any reasonable person would think, “What, you only have a big family meal once a year? And what’s so special about vegetable-based desserts, or the Macy’s parade?”
I miss Thanksgiving
More specifically, I miss: the smell of pie in the oven, sitting around listening to all the same family stories, visiting friends with wine and cookies, sneaking another slice of pumpkin pie out of the fridge even though you’re not that hungry, just because it looks so good.
Then there’s Christmas, which is less of a shock, because most stores here like to use the idea of Christmas as a marketing tool and the malls are full of decorated trees, toy promotions, and soft instrumental versions of “Jingle Bells” played over the PA system between the calls for prayer. All vague, disorienting reminders of ‘holiday-ness’ without anything substantial behind them: no Christmas Eve church service, no terrible weather, no grade-school pageants, no cheesy plastic Nativity scenes on front lawns, no ice-skating or carols or snowdrifts. Imagine a whole lot of balsam-scented air freshener, but no Christmas tree – that’s Christmas in Dubai.
The best things about these holidays, of course, is not the holiday itself but the excuse to celebrate: that you have good friends, that you still love your family and they still love you, that pumpkin pie is still tasty, that whatever you are grateful for still makes you feel happy. Missing all this, I think, is what makes me feel so strange this time of year.
I think, though, MHS gets better the longer you are away. These will be my second set of ignored holidays, and I have every hope they will be better this year, and perhaps hardly noticable by Year Three. Actually, that thought makes me a little sad too.
