Birthdays and Thanksgiving: Sixth Meeting

            Since Ibrahim had done me the favor of speaking to my class the week before, I decided to buy him coffee for our meeting to show my thanks. He was a few minutes late so I went ahead and ordered our coffees and waited for him. When he showed up I gave him his coffee and we celebrated for a bit over his fantastic scores on the English exams he had been taking. I could tell that his English had been improving week by week and I was glad to see that all of his hard work paid off in his scores. Ibrahim told me that his mom was excited and he was glad that he would be able to see his friends in Chicago.

            After we had been talking for a bit, Ibrahim told me that it had been his birthday the day before. I wish he would have told me so that I could have brought him a gift or a cake or something! His friends had woken him up the morning before with cake and presents and then he celebrated with his fellow classmates with drinks that night. He told me that he loved the way that Americans celebrated birthdays. Back home, he explained, birthdays were not as big of a deal and often you did nothing out of the ordinary for your birthday. Ibrahim told me that he really liked the way you stood out more on your birthday here and he enjoyed the presents that his friends thought to get him. I laughed as he told me that the year before, his first birthday in America, he could barely blow out all the candles on the gigantic birthday cake his friend had made him and he had to try several times to make them all go out.

             As we continued on the topic of holidays, I brought up Thanksgiving as it was coming up the next week. Ibrahim told me that he and his classmates were going to eat with an American family for Thanksgiving so they could experience the holiday together. He asked me what the holiday was about and he asked if we all told the wishes that we had for the year at the dinner table. I explained to him that it wasn’t quite like that. In my family, we all say a few things that we are thankful for at Thanksgiving at the table. I told him that it was just a way to forget about all of the worries of life for a little while and remember the good things instead of dwelling on the bad. He thought this was a great concept and we talked for a while on his knowledge of the first Thanksgiving with the pilgrims and the Native Americans. It was neat to see a different culture’s point of view on a truly American holiday. Since there is no Saudi equivalent to it, it made it all the more interesting to see how Ibrahim understood the holiday in his own terms. I am glad that he and his classmates were able to find someone to experience Thanksgiving with so they could see it from a traditional standpoint.