sugar high.

It’s Seker Bayram [sugar festival] or Eid ul-Fitr in Arabic.

That means there’s sugar sugar everywhere!

Seker bayram marks the end of the Ramazan holiday [the Islamic month of fast]. It lasts for three days and is marked by many traditions. It’s different in different countries, but some traditions in Turkey include:

1. Everyone puts on fancy shmancy clothes—also known as the bayram outfit—that are bought especially for the occasion.

2. After getting all dressed up, people go visit their relatives and have a big delicious meal…in broad daylight [the first time in a month]!

3. Kids go from door to door visiting their elders, kissing their hands and touching it to their forehead. In return, they are given sweets—hard candies, lokum [Turkish delight], baklava. Think trick-or-treating sans tricks.

4. Traditional sweets are doled out everywhere—lokum, baklava, and Jordan almonds [chocolate and candy coated almonds, oftentimes brightly colored] are particularly characteristic.

5. People go on trips—some go back to their villages to visit family, others [like my cousins] go on a vacation to the beach or Cappadocia—drastically emptying the big cities.

The border between Turkey and Syria is actually opened for 48 hours to let people pass through and visit family on the holiday. Now that is pretty intense!

Yesterday was the first day of seker bayram. I forgot that this meant absolutely everything would be closed, including grocery stores, and that there would be no weekly produce pazar. Consequently, around noon I went out to go to the pazar and was greeted by a wonderful emptiness and silence throughout the streets.

Forgetting the fact that it meant I couldn’t get any food to eat, it was nice to experience the city blanketed by a quiet calm. Very few people were out-and-about so I was free to walk in the middle of the street without getting funny stares or being killed by idiot drivers.

This was all a drastic change from the previous day, when I went to the store to buy lemons and scallions and ended up standing in the check-out line for 20 minutes. Everyone was doing their holiday shopping, with the focus being on candy. Piles and piles of it filled the market and, along the street, every pastry shop was dripping with syrup-soaked baklavas and overflowing with boxes and boxes of hard candies for sale.

Later in the afternoon, I headed to my aunt Nurten’s house for a bayram lunch with her and my cousins. After lunch together we went to visit my aunt Nebahat, who was just released from the hospital after having the battery in her pacemaker replaced. Yeah, bayraminiz kutlu olsun to you Nebahat.

My aunt Nebahat is loved by everyone and it’s not hard to see why. She’s got some crazy infectious laughter and a truly atypical approach to life [by Turkish standards]—heaven’s me, the woman keeps her windows and curtains open because she likes the sun and fresh air! She’s very cute and loves it when people come up to her window and chat with her. If she wants or needs anything someone will come to the window and happily do her bidding. She’s 85 and the most jovial woman I know. Really, all of my aunts love to laugh and are just generally delighted by life; you can’t help but feel good when you’re around them.

Many people came to visit my aunt Nebahat because, as I said, everyone loves her. She’s the mother, grandmother, and aunt of the whole neighborhood. So, there was a nice big group at her house. Of course, we are an opinionated and loud family, so the sitting room quite literally shook with people shouting and speaking over each other. But, there was lots of laughing, too. Lots of laughing...and, as it should be, lots of sweets and sweetness. Come now, can there be a better celebration of the sugar festival?

Of course, it wasn't all sweetness. I mean, my aunt had just returned from the hospital. Additionally, as the greater proportion of people at Nebahat's were in the upper range of the age spectrum, the conversation tended towards aches, pains, and illnesses. Consequently, I spent a lot of time daydreaming about how cool it would be to say:

Sekeeeeeeeeeeeeeer!

in place of

Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeet!


Or, maybe,

Seker, dude! That's totally seker!

instead of

Sweet, dude! That's totally sweet!


Wouldn't that be fantastic?
Come on, anyone with me here? Anyone...?

Fine, don't agree.
I can handle it.
Nothing, and I mean nothing, can ruin a sugar festival!