The Window, the Church, and Santa Claus

The first time I remember noticing that I was different from someone I loved, it was not because anyone made me feel outside.

It was because I was invited in.

His name was Simon.

I do not remember a time before Simon. In the geography of my childhood, he was simply there — one floor above us, a flight of stairs away. Close enough that his home felt like an extension of mine, but different enough that it carried its own kind of wonder.

Simon was my best friend.

He was gentle in a way I still remember, even though he was very much still a boy. That gentleness stood out to me, maybe because I grew up around my cousins too — rougher boys, louder boys, boys who moved through the world with an energy that could easily swallow a girl whole. Simon was different. Softer. Not delicate, but kind.

We played at the bottom of our apartment complex, circling around on our bikes as though the parking lot and building entrance were the whole world. We played in his apartment bedroom, one floor up from ours. I can still remember the stairs that separated us — not as distance, but as passage. A small climb from one home into another.

His home felt like my home, but with a little more glam.

There was something slightly more polished, more stylish, more surprising in the way things were done there. His mother, Tant Tarez, made familiar things feel more interesting. A labneh sandwich was not just a labneh sandwich. She might spread it with jam, turning something simple into something that tasted almost like cheesecake.

My mother would chalk this up to the fact that they were Lebanese.

The glamorous people of the Levant.

I smile now thinking of that, because it says so much about the world we came from — all the affection, teasing, admiration, comparison, and rivalry folded into one comment.

As a child, I did not have language for any of this.

I only knew that their home felt warm.

I knew that Tant Tarez was kind.

I knew that Simon’s sisters, Lily and Suzie, were beautiful.

They were older, teenage girls, with long straight golden hair and green eyes, the kind of beauty that felt almost cinematic to me as a child. I would watch them and try to catch glimpses of that beauty, fascinated by it. Simon had fair skin, green-hazel eyes, and dark straight hair. I was olive-skinned, with hazel-brown eyes and curly hair.

I noticed the difference, but I did not yet understand all the ways our region had been taught to rank beauty. I did not yet understand how colonized the Levantine mind could be when it came to what we were taught to admire.

At the time, it did not matter.

They were warm.

They were kind.

They were beautiful.

And I loved them.

Simon and I spent hours together in that endless, unselfconscious way children do, when friendship has not yet been complicated by history, religion, politics, or the adult need to categorize everything. We rode bikes. We played board games. We moved between homes. We even watched Michael Jackson’s Thriller video together when it came out, which in my memory feels like a whole event — a room, a screen, a little fear, a lot of excitement, and the feeling that we were witnessing something we would remember forever.

But there are two memories with Simon’s family that remain even more vivid than the rest.

The first is the church.

I remember being invited to a ceremony for Simon. For years, I thought of it simply as the time I went to his church. I remember the church being large. I remember sitting far back, not close to the front. I do not remember who took me, though I am fairly certain I was not with my own family. I must have gone with his.

That detail matters to me now.

Because no one made a big issue of it.

I was simply included.

I remember seeing Simon dressed in a white robe. I remember watching him ascend to take a piece of bread from the priest. I knew nothing about the symbolism of that ritual. I did not ask what it meant. I did not understand communion, sacrament, Maronite tradition, or the language of the ceremony.

I only understood that it was sacred.

And that it was not ours.

Not ours, meaning not my family’s. Not Muslim. Not Palestinian in the way my own family life was Palestinian. Not part of the rituals I knew.

But I was not uncomfortable with that.

I was not afraid.

I was curious.

The whole experience felt grand. Formal. Beautiful in a way I did not have to possess in order to appreciate. I was old enough to know that I was witnessing something different, but young enough not to turn difference into distance.

A child sitting near the back of a church, watching her friend receive something holy, understanding without words that there were other ways to belong to God, to family, to tradition.

The second memory is the window.

Simon’s family told us Santa Claus visited them at Christmas, and somehow, my sister Nora and I convinced ourselves that maybe Santa could make a stop for us too.

Two Muslim girls waiting for Santa Claus.

I must have been seven or eight years old. Nora would have been five or six. We were in our shared bedroom, in our pajamas, long after we should have been asleep. The apartment was dark. Outside the window, the parking lot of our apartment complex sat below us, ordinary and quiet.

But we were not quiet.

We were giddy.

Bursting with energy.

Peering through the window, scanning the darkness for some sign that magic might arrive.

We were not entirely naïve. Part of us suspected that Santa might actually be Simon’s older sister, Lily. But that suspicion did not ruin the wonder. If anything, it made it better. We wanted to catch the transformation. We wanted to see how the magic worked. We wanted proof that something impossible could pass through the ordinary world — through a parking lot, through an apartment building, through the window of two little girls who had somehow been invited into someone else’s Christmas.

That is the part I keep coming back to.

The invitation.

No one told us Christmas was ours.

No one told us we had to pretend to be Christian.

No one suggested that participating in someone else’s joy made us less Muslim, less Palestinian, less ourselves.

We were simply close enough to love them, and they were close enough to share their wonder with us.

In the world I knew as a child, Muslims and Christians lived in a kind of everyday harmony that felt completely natural. Not through grand gestures, but through the ordinary tenderness of acknowledging each other’s joy.

In the Middle East, Christians wish Muslims Eid Mubarak. Muslims wish Christians Merry Christmas. Maamoul appears across tables. Sweets cross thresholds. Greetings are offered with sincerity, not suspicion.

It was not about becoming the same.

It was about honouring what mattered to the people you loved.

That tradition still moves me because I have seen it survive exile. Even here in Canada, I have witnessed that same warmth — Muslims and Christians from the region still recognizing one another’s holidays, still sending greetings, still finding ways to show respect for each other’s rituals despite the divisions that get sewn around us here.

No one had to explain coexistence to me as a child.

We were living it.

Just as life.

Children moving between homes.

Mothers sending food.

Neighbours sharing holidays.

A church ceremony.

Christmas wonder.

A labneh sandwich with jam.

A staircase between two apartments that never felt like a border.

Looking back now, I understand that Simon’s family gave me one of my earliest encounters with difference. But difference did not arrive as a wound. It did not arrive as suspicion. It did not arrive as a question about whether I belonged.

It arrived through love.

That feels important to remember now, because later the world would teach me other things.

Later, I would learn that identity could be made sharp. That religion could be turned into accusation. That being Palestinian could become something people debated, dismissed, or tried to erase. That where I was born could be used to reduce me, as though being born in one place cancelled the blood, memory, history, and peoplehood of another.

Those lessons did not begin for me in that apartment complex.

They came later.

And maybe that is why my memories of Simon and his family feel so tender. They belong to a time before difference had been weaponized in my life. Before I understood that love and politics could one day collide. Before I knew that the same world that allowed children to move so freely between homes could also grow into a world where people would choose sides against each other’s humanity.

When we moved to Canada, I lost contact with Simon and his family.

For years, they lived in my memory the way childhood friends often do — suspended in a kind of golden stillness. I would think of him with fondness. I would remember our bikes, his apartment, the stairs, the feeling of being known by someone who had simply always been there.

Then Facebook arrived.

And like so many people searching for pieces of a life before the internet, I searched high and low until I found them.

Finding Simon, Lily, and Suzie again as an adult gave me a kind of closure I did not know I needed. There was joy in discovering that people from my earliest life still existed somewhere in the world. But there was sadness too. I learned that Tant Tarez had passed away from cancer, and that news hit me in a place I did not expect.

She had been part of the architecture of my childhood.

One of the mothers in the background.

One of the women whose home had held me.

Her loss felt like the loss of a room I could never re-enter.

But reconnecting also brought the complicated truth of adulthood.

The world had reached us.

Politics had reached us.

History had reached us in different ways.

Simon, in a detail that touched me deeply, had married a Christian Palestinian. But Lily — beautiful Lily, the older sister Nora and I once suspected might be Santa Claus — had moved politically toward views I could not reconcile with the childhood we had shared.

That broke my heart.

Not because I expected childhood friendship to solve the world. But because some part of me wanted to believe that being loved by a Palestinian child would have left enough of an imprint to make my people’s humanity undeniable.

That is a child’s hope, maybe.

Or perhaps it is the ache of diaspora.

The belief that proximity should protect us from erasure. That if someone knew us closely enough — if they played with us, fed us, welcomed us, watched us grow — they would never be able to align themselves with ideas that deny us.

But adulthood is not that simple.

Love does not always become politics.

Memory does not always become solidarity.

Childhood intimacy does not always survive the stories people choose later.

And yet, I do not want that heartbreak to take the childhood memory away from me.

Because the child’s truth was real too.

Simon was my best friend.

Tant Tarez was warm to me.

Their home was open.

Their Christmas entered my imagination.

Their church taught me that another tradition could feel unfamiliar without feeling threatening.

Their family helped me understand difference before the world taught me to fear what difference could become.

Maybe that is why this memory belongs inside The Thobe Project.

At first glance, it may not seem directly connected to embroidery or fabric or Palestinian dress. But the more I sit with this project, the more I understand that a thobe is not only about what is stitched onto cloth.

It is also about what is stitched into a person.

The rooms.

The staircases.

The neighbours.

The rituals.

The first friendships.

The first moments when you begin to understand who you are because someone else opens a door and lets you see who they are too.

This project is not only an archive of grief.

It is not only about loss, rupture, exile, and what was taken.

It must also hold the memory of what was possible.

The ordinary harmony.

The shared greetings.

The neighbour’s door.

The little Muslim girl waiting at the window for Santa Claus, not because she wanted to become someone else, but because she had been invited into the wonder of someone else’s world and trusted that there was room for her there.

And maybe this is why, years later, as a mother raising children in Canada, I chose to have a Christmas tree in our home.

Not because I had forgotten who I was.

Not because I wanted to become something else.

But because some part of me still remembered that wonder.

My husband, a Lebanese Sunni Muslim, had grown up with a Christmas tree too — first in Kuwait, and later in Canada. To him, it was not a contradiction. It was part of the cultural fabric we came from, where Christmas could be celebrated with beauty and warmth even by those who did not belong to the faith behind it.

So I let that memory continue.

For my children, the tree is festive. Joyful. Part of the season they are growing up in here.

For me, it is also something else.

A small act of continuity.

A way of carrying forward the world I first knew as a child — a world where faith was particular, but love was generous. Where a Muslim girl could wait for Santa without feeling less Muslim. Where a Christian neighbour’s joy could enter our home without threatening our own. Where difference did not yet mean distance.

I do not miss Simon and his family as an open wound. Finding them again gave me closure.

But I do miss, and still deeply honour, the version of the world they represented before I knew how easily the world could divide itself.

A world where a staircase between two homes was not a border.

Where a church could be entered with curiosity.

Where Christmas and Eid could be met with sweetness.

Where love came before category.

And where, for a little while, a Palestinian girl and a Lebanese Maronite boy could belong to each other’s childhood without needing to explain anything at all.