The end-of-year celebrations in Morocco are characteristic of the country’s dual culture and reasonable accommodations, to use a Canadian expression…
Muslims have only two holidays: Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of Ramadan fasting, and Eid al-Kebir, or more accurately, Eid al-Adha, which is called the Feast of the Sheep (as if it were the poor animal’s holiday) or the Feast of Sacrifice, since it commemorates Abraham’s sacrifice.
Apart from that, public holidays are simply… public holidays, or commemorations, but not religious celebrations. Mawlid, which is the prophet’s birthday, for example, is not celebrated by strict Muslims.
Morocco inherited from its French period a European-style working week, with Saturdays and Sundays off, and “Western” public holidays such as 1 January and 1 May.
But Morocco thrives on tourism, so it offers New Year’s Eve tours in the desert and Christmas holidays in the sun. Tourist destinations have therefore embraced the concept. You see fir trees palm trees decorated with Christmas garlands and Berber pompoms, and in our future riad, we have already invested in decorations.
But Morocco has a large French population, concentrated in cities such as Agadir, Marrakesh, Casablanca and Tangier, and these expatriates want to celebrate Christmas in style if they are not returning to Europe for the holidays. So supermarkets and shops get into the Christmas spirit. It’s very funny to see the promotional area at Marjane Californie filled with toys, plastic Christmas trees and decorations, when you remember how it was filled with knives and skewers for Eid… and when you know how hard French supermarkets try to promote “Ramadan” by calling it “Oriental Week”.
But… there’s no Christmas spirit. For Moroccans, New Year’s Eve means nothing; they’re more inclined to celebrate the Muslim New Year, though without much enthusiasm either. The weather is fine, but there are no decorations in the streets (there are some “Christmas-like decorations”, but these are decorations that are put up all year round (and yes, in the middle of July, we were surprised to see garlands with stars!).
For Stephanie and me, Christmas and New Year’s Eve mean cold weather, rain, snow when we’re lucky, and the pleasure of wrapping up warm, looking at shop windows overflowing with lights, going to tea rooms at the weekend and enjoying hot chocolate with ginger or cinnamon biscuits…
This year, we missed a lot of things. We never would have thought, for example, that the crowds in the shops and the chore of last-minute gift shopping were part of what we love about Christmas! The atmosphere, the fact that everyone is thinking the same thing, the abundance of green and red (and again, as these are the colours of the Moroccan flag, we see a lot of them), the music in the streets, the Christmas markets… One of our friends, who has been living in Morocco for twenty years, goes somewhere in the Atlas Mountains every year, to Midelt or Ifrane, just to feel the cold and walk in the snow!
(The Santa Claus seller is a photograph licensed under CC BY NC ND by MarocStoun on Flickr)
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