Decorated Christmas trees fill many shop windows here. At some clothing stores, the mannequins wear plastic Santa masks and black-tasseled red fezzes. Young street hawkers thread their way through the city's manic traffic wearing Santa hats strung with blinking lights. In the capital of the world's most populous Arab nation, it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas, more and more every year.The holiday's gift-giving and decorating traditions have spread around the globe, even to many non-Christian nations - and an ever-growing number of Egyptians, Christian and Muslim alike, are enthusiastically adopting it as well.
Outside florist shops, you can find several types of Christmas trees for sale; native cypress, Holland fir and artificial trees made in China line the sidewalks. Specialty shops sell handmade colored-glass ornaments and small hand-painted statues of an Egyptian "Baba Noel" (Father Noel) carrying a sack of gifts. Greeting cards with hand-stitched designs of the Holy Family increasingly are popular; the cards are created by Christian families of the Zabaleen, the city's garbage collectors.
Although Egypt is overwhelmingly Muslim, 10 percent to 15 percent of its 80 million people are Coptic Christians. They take pride in Egypt's place in the biblical narrative as the refuge to which the Holy Family fled, to escape the pogrom of King Herod of Judea. While Coptic and Orthodox Christians here celebrate Christmas on Jan. 7, based on the Julian calendar, many come out early to buy holiday trees and decorations.
Many Egyptian Muslims buy Christmas trees, and some celebrate the holiday as many do in Europe and the Americas. "We always celebrate Christmas," says Dolly Degwy, 40, a Muslim artist and writer with big, brown eyes and long, curly brown hair. "It's a time of the year when we are happy. We make a point that it is the birth of Jesus."
Degwy hosts a Christmas Eve dinner for Muslim and Christian friends, although she "dropped the turkey meal years ago," and she attends a Christmas Day dinner at a Muslim friend's home. "We don't have the equivalent of an Islamic holiday where you give gifts and decorate the house," she says. "We do it for the kids, as well." She has two Christmas trees in her home; one is in the bedroom of her 9-year-old daughter, who "gets to gussy it up the way she likes to," says Degwy, speaking with a slight British accent. "We have loads of gifts under the tree."
On the sidewalk outside the Gardenia florist shop, a wide selection of Christmas trees is mixed with cypress-leaf advent wreaths, Chinese-made ornaments and rice lights, and poinsettias imported from Holland. Ala Rady, the shop's manager for 30 years, says tree sales were down this year. "We used to get the big trees from Holland. Now we don't get too many, because they cost too much, and people aren't buying them." The trees can cost 1,000 Egyptian pounds, or $181.
More Egyptians than foreigners buy his trees, he says, explaining that "Muslims also like the tree for a new year's celebration. Everyone likes to celebrate Christmas, just like Christians celebrate our holidays." The best-selling trees this year? Artificial trees made in China, because they are cheaper and can be reused next year, he says. "Everything is coming from China. There is a joke that one day we will come home and find out that our spouses are Chinese."
An abundance of Christmas decorations spills from the Gift and Toys shop on the packed main thoroughfare of Zemalek, an upscale island neighborhood. A red-and-gold "Merry Christmas" sign hangs above the shop's door next to a Santa in a sleigh; reindeer are strung along a wire line into the top of a nearby tree. A near-life-sized wooden nativity crèche fills one front window. Three more nativity scenes, all imported from Italy, are inside, along with Chinese-made decorations. "What Child is This?" and "O, Little Town of Bethlehem" play from the store's loudspeakers. "Muslims will buy everything except the nativity scenes and religious icons — but the Santas, trees and ornaments they buy," says salesman Hussein Salah.
Dagwy, who says she doesn't have a typical Muslim outlook, explained that Muslims who celebrate Christmas may have spent time in the West or married Christians. "We went to church schools and grew up among Christians," she said. "Most Muslims don't look at Christmas that way but we are very eclectic, religiously."