Christmas comes twice in Cairo

In Cairo the festive season does not end on the twenty-sixth. It has barely started.

Thursday is Christmas for the expat table, the hotel lunch and the family that put up a tree because the mall did. Then New Year's Eve. Then, on 7 January, Christmas again, for the millions of Egyptian families who keep the Coptic calendar and for whom the twenty-fifth was a Thursday like any other. That is the day the whole country takes off.

The run-up has a shape you can see from a restaurant. Many of those families keep a fast through the weeks before, no meat, no dairy, so a share of the regulars have been ordering differently since late November. The fast ends after the midnight service on the sixth, and the meal that follows is the one the family has been waiting for. The gifts, the new clothes for the children, the lunch out on the holiday: all of it lands in the first week of January.

Now look at the festive plan that arrives from Dubai. It was written for a city where the season peaks on the twenty-fifth and the residents fly out on the twenty-sixth. The offer runs to Boxing Day. The decorations come down in the first week of January. The creators were booked for Christmas Eve. It is a good plan for Dubai, and in Cairo it has packed up a fortnight before the larger customer arrives.

This is what breaks when a playbook crosses a border. The dates. A plan that closes on the twenty-sixth has chosen, without knowing it, to serve the smaller of Cairo's two Christmases and go dark for the bigger one.

The plan written from Cairo prices a fortnight. It has a menu for the fast and a menu for the night the fast ends. It keeps the lights up until the seventh. And it knows, for the household it is writing to, which of the two nights is the one that matters, because in this city that is the whole season.