A season before the season

There is a shop on my route in Cairo that sells nothing anybody wants in April.

Lanterns in three sizes. String lights. Serving dishes wide enough for a table of twelve. Water jugs. A run of fabric for the table, in the colours everybody knows the month by. Small trays for dates. For most of the year it is a homeware shop with a slow window. In the fortnight before Ramadan there is a ladder propped against the front of it and a queue at the till at nine in the evening.

That shop has a season, and with the month expected around the eighteenth, depending on the sighting, the season is now.

Here is the part the plan gets wrong. The season does not run through Ramadan. It ends on the night Ramadan starts.

Nobody buys a lantern on the third of the month. By then the lights are up, the dishes are out, and the household has stopped buying things for the month and started living inside it. Whatever is on that shelf in the second week is a markdown. Whatever did not sell in this fortnight sits in a stockroom for eleven months.

Which means the job of that shop's advertising is not the job the calendar hands it. The regional Ramadan plan has one shape: come on after sunset, run through the nights, weight the last ten days. That shape is right for food, for delivery, for a phone contract, for a hotel with a tent to fill. For the lanterns and the tableware and the fabric, it is the fortnight after the customer stopped looking.

Some categories have their Ramadan before Ramadan. Their whole year turns on a moon nobody has seen yet, and the media plan is still waiting for it.