One road to Jesus
Saturday, March 30 2024
In the midst of this Easter season, we share a story written by Rana Atie. Rana is Executive Director of CFOS and a Palestinian Christian Canadian. She lives with her family in Montreal.
One road to Jesus is through Palestinian culture
The weeks leading up to Easter are very important within my network of family and friends. It is a bustling time that lasts longer than Christmas but is not necessarily as obvious. Yet, the family gathers for longer periods of time around Easter traditions for the sole purpose of creating our Palestinian symbolic stuffed cookies and preparing our Palm Sunday clothes and candles. This takes weeks! But oh, what a pleasure it is to repeat the process every year.
When I was little, I could not understand the fuss all the adults made around our Palm Sunday clothes. We call it Shaaniny. Kind of like it sounds, it had to be shiny, brightening the road that paved Jesus’s way into our beloved Jerusalem. My grandmother, 96 years old today, and now the last Nakba survivor in our family, would sew all our clothes. My mom and her sisters would go to extensive lengths to find the prettiest decorations for our candles; they had to match our attire. On Palm Sunday, we would gather at church for the service and go outside for the procession. My dad would sit me on his shoulders and our candles would be lit as the adults carried olive branches or woven palm leaves. Processions were always fun. It was an amazing time of reuniting with friends and families, exchanging hugs and greetings. The children all looked adorable and for 8-year-old me, it was a rare occasion to be free from Sunday school! Little did I understand the importance of these traditions, not just from a religious point of view but also from a cultural one.
Raised with that Christian Palestinian background, in time I understood that the Holy Weeks leading to Easter were central in preserving our traditions and heritage. Christ had risen—has risen—in Palestine and we Palestinians meticulously incorporate that into every aspect of this month. From the beginning of Lent to the sharing of Easter food, everything has a piece of Our Lord’s story drawn into it.
One of the traditions less familiar in other cultures is our stuffed butter cookies. We make three kinds. The first and most popular is filled with dates, and takes the shape of a crown, for the crown of thorns that Jesus had to wear. The second is stuffed with a walnut mixture, that forms a small bundle to look like the sponge of Pontus Pilate. The third, filled with a pistachio mixture, takes an elongated shape to represent the tomb from which Jesus rose.
Though you may find similar recipes among other Arabic cultures, none of them do it the way we do. The main difference is the way we shape these cookies. No “self- respecting” Palestinian grandmother would allow any of her descendants to use a mold! No, we have to go through the painstaking work of shaping each cookie by hand and then decorating them with rectangular flat tweezers no bigger than my thumb. After all, if Jesus suffered so much for us, we could suffer a little for him.
The other very important thing about these cookies is that recipes and craftsmanship are passed down by grandmas, seating their daughters and granddaughters around the table to teach them through practice. As years went by and my family was scattered around the world, wherever siblings or cousins were close together they gathered in the kitchen of the eldest to make the cookies and repeat what they were taught. May God help you if you did not do them properly! This was the case for my aunties Coco and Vivi. One year when the youngest Vivi was rushing the process, her older sister Coco made her eat each ugly one raw! Yes, Vivi was sick for three days, but the lesson was learnt, and we laugh about it each year.
As my grandma is too old to make them now, every Easter month my mom (eldest of her sisters) gathers us with our cousins and children in her kitchen to start getting the cookies ready. This happens over the course of several days, as the process is time-consuming, and we make huge quantities. We sit there talking loudly, complaining about how our fingers will be swollen the next day, remembering old times and laughing profusely. We take coffee breaks whilst the kids and my dad try to steal a cookie or two; usually they get away with the “ugly” ones. When the cookies are cooled my mom preserves them in big jars in a cold room till it’s time for each one of us to get our share. Easter morning is the special moment when we break our fast with the delightful pastries.
Though my heart is not in a festive mood this year, unlike the Christmas festivities we canceled I am determined to preserve these Holy Month traditions. My grandmother may not be sewing our clothes, but for this Orthodox Palm Sunday I will shop for new clothes with pride. I will once again rummage through my mother’s collection of ribbons, beads and fake flowers to decorate my daughter’s candle. My husband will sit her on his shoulders and with the family we will shine the road of the procession as we walk with Jesus into Jerusalem! Together us Palestinian women of the Gedeon and Nasr union, will work our fingers to the bone as a reminder to the Christian world that Jesus has risen in Palestine. No matter how badly our bodies, minds, and souls are broken, we will be inspired by the risen Christ to stay steadfast and strong.
May God have mercy on our brothers and sisters back home.
Thanks for reading!
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Canadian Friends of Sabeel is a national ecumenical response to the call of Palestinian Christians for solidarity. Through education and engagement, we support the struggle for equality in justice, freedom, and human rights of Palestinians living under apartheid and the illegal Israeli military occupation. With partners around the world, we work non-violently for a just and durable peace for Palestinians and Israelis.
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