{"id":39428,"date":"2015-01-14T17:31:00","date_gmt":"2015-01-14T17:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=39428"},"modified":"2015-01-14T17:38:17","modified_gmt":"2015-01-14T17:38:17","slug":"christmas-without-ramadan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=39428","title":{"rendered":"Christmas without Ramadan"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/mixedrootsstories.com\/christmas-without-ramadan\/\" target=\"_blank\"><em><strong>Christmas without Ramadan<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/mixedrootsstories.com\" target=\"_blank\">Mixed Roots Stories<\/a><br \/>\n2015-01-09<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/ZenaItani\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>Zena F. Itani<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve never really liked Christmas. It was the most forced family event of the year, defined by spectacular displays of anxiety from my mother and bad temper served up by my father, always in time for guests. While that doesn\u2019t sound much different from others\u2019 fun family holidays, there was another layer of dysfunction in it for me. My Dad is Muslim, a fact that we ignored for the entire year, not just on big Christian holidays. December 25th highlighted particularly well the lack of Muslim traditions in my immediate family, despite the fact that Lebanese Muslims outnumbered my English mother\u2019s kin and me and my American siblings.<\/p>\n<p>Let me walk you through a typical Itani Christmas (you Arabic speakers know how ridiculous the pairing of a large Lebanese Muslim family name and the word \u201cChristmas\u201d is). In the morning, my siblings and I woke up way too early and tore into our presents like obnoxious kids the world over. The gifts broke along gender and culture lines. As the one with the Arabic name and the insatiable curiosity for all things Middle Eastern, I would get the \u201ccultural\u201d gift (a subscription to Foreign Affairs was popular). \u201cYou\u2019re so\u2026<em>Oriental<\/em>,\u201d my mother would often say, perplexed, in her British accent. Um, yeah Mom, did you see the Lebanese guy you married? Just saying&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Read the entire article <a href=\"http:\/\/mixedrootsstories.com\/christmas-without-ramadan\/\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Christmas without Ramadan Mixed Roots Stories 2015-01-09 Zena F. Itani I\u2019ve never really liked Christmas. It was the most forced family event of the year, defined by spectacular displays of anxiety from my mother and bad temper served up by my father, always in time for guests. While that doesn\u2019t sound much different from others\u2019 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,395,8,820],"tags":[15960,19056,19057],"class_list":["post-39428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-autobiography","category-media-archive","category-religion","tag-mixed-roots-stories","tag-zena-f-itani","tag-zena-itani"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39428"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39428\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}