[singlepic=614,320,240,,]
To answer many people’s questions from back in the States, yes, Cairenes do celebrate Christmas. Adrienne and I escaped the poor air quality of Cairo for a little while to visit Nuweiba, on the Gulf of Aqaba. We had a wonderful time there (mostly), but on the way back to Cairo, on December 24th, we caught site of guys hawking Santa’s caps on main streets in town. We went for a walk through Sayeda Zeinab and Islamic Cairo on Christmas day, then walked through Khan al-Khalili (the big tourist bazaar) and back toward home via Opera Square. We passed some rather strange Christmas displays along the way, with some really creepy Santa masks. A couple days later, we passed by another creepy Santa window display in Zamalek, while shopping for rum for egg nog (at a place called “Drikies”, which is like the BevMo of Cairo, but, as you might expect, with a very poor selection—there were maybe a total of 20 different brands of beer, wine and liquor, and it was interesting to see how they managed to fill up the shelves with such little variety). American-style Christmas displays abound everywhere, with tinsel and red and green streamers and Santas and tannenbäumer and stars. It clearly has as little to do with the birth of Christ as the American version, but the ubiquity of evergreen trees and poinsettias is particularly striking in a land where frankincense and myrrh would be more at home. Furthermore, Coptic Christians, who constitute the vast majority of actual Christians in this country, won’t be celebrating Christmas until this coming Monday (January 7th).
