Take Halloween. Halloween in Oregon, Halloween for my entire life, the only Halloween our kids have known. Well, it looks a little something like this: start planning what costume you want around September, just as the fall days start to tease you with a cool bite in the evening air. (February if the blasted catalogues from Party Express come in the mail and your kids see them before you can quickly deposit them in the recycling bin.) Then October rolls around and the entire month of weekends is dedicated to one pumpkin patch or another. You can never go to the pumpkin patch too many times. You need a trip dedicated to pony rides, train rides, and hay bail rides. A weekend of rides. Then you need a trip dedicated to eating - cotton candy, caramel apples, kettle corn, pumpkin spice lattes, hot chocolate... Of course you'll still need at least one more weekend dedicated to the actual selection of a pumpkin, or five. And the sugar cookies, oh, the sugar cookies. It's a family tradition. It's a two day ordeal; one that Steve usually tries to hide from. The flour all over the kitchen. The green frosting embedded in the cracks of the red table. The black frosting stuck beneath the fingernails of three small children. It's much to much for some people. I get that. For us though, it's Halloween. Halloween isn't a day. It's a season.
Halloween night comes. The air is eery and cool. We order our Mexican pizza from Charlie's Pizza. The Vibberts come screaming in. Cackee arrives in all her glory with her Mother Nature costume on, ready to take on door duty while the rest of us barrel into the night with all shades of excitement for the impending sugar rush. We inhale some dinner. Sneak in some candy. Slip out the front door and off we go. We may or may not be scared into screams by sneaky goblins. We're at the edge of ours seats to see if any horrific thing will happen to poor Livy to make this year "the WORST Halloween, evohr". Words shrieked from her lips at the tender age of five when a teenage boy made the mistake of scaring the pants off four unsuspecting children. It did make for one of the most hilarious moments of our lives. The kids? Not so much. Last Halloween our cat died in the front yard. Yes. On Halloween night. From Livy's mouth, in tears, "NO! Now *this* is the WORST Halloween EVER!" It was much cuter when she couldn't say her r sounds.
And so it was. Halloween in Madras. The only kind of Halloween our kids had known.
Then we moved to Doha. Another land. Another way. They don't celebrate Halloween here. We no longer receive Party Express catalogues in the mail (reason enough to move to another country, right there). There aren't any pumpkin patches. No Cackee. No Vibberts. And this, this is the moment it hits home for the three sweets. It's different.
Not worse. They did still get to go trick or treating. It wasn't actually on Halloween night. There wasn't a chill in the air. Palm trees, were the backdrop for the annual Halloween costume photo. Zoey hit the mythical age of 12 and insisted that it was no longer "cool" to trick-or-treat. Their chocolate candy may have melted before we got it home. Their costumes were definitely thrown together approximately 25 minutes before we stepped out the door. There weren't any ghouls waiting to scare Livy. There wasn't a dead cat in our front yard. Mother Nature didn't make an appearance. And the screams of Noah and Drew could not be heard throughout the neighborhood. What it wasn't... it wasn't "the worst Halloween ever!" It was just the most different.
The Souq Waqif! That's what we needed. A little souq fix. We talked our neighbors down the road (and by 'down the road', I mean about 25 yards away) into coming with us. Drew and Livy piled into the Yukon Denali with our neighbors and their kids. Zoey came with us. We met at the souq and the magic began to unfold. As I mentioned, it was Eid week. Lots of celebrations were taking place. I didn't know about or understand any of them, really. It was serendipity.
We parked the car, walked a couple blocks to the souq, entered through the nearest corridor and landed smack dab in the middle of a parade. Literally. Zoey and I were nearly trampled by stilt walkers. The place was teeming with activity. There were stilt walkers, bouncy stilt people, acrobats, people swallowing fire, dogs doing amazing tricks on stage, and Qatari musicians performing their traditional music. And my personal favorite - a tight rope walker! There were camel rides for the kids, giant trampolines, and jousting fun for Livy and Zoey who had some sisterly aggression to work through with the aid of inflatable jousting sticks. Sadly, we missed the camel rides. They closed an hour earlier than we thought they did. Next time. Crazy fun!
We topped the night off with an ice-cream fondue for four. (Drew wanted his very own ice cream cone. Who would have guessed?) As we all walked back to our car I looked as Steve. We exchanged a contented smile and I uttered the words, "Different. Not worse." It was a happy Halloween after all.
