Garga'oon

Sunday night was Garga'oon in our village! It's a celebration of one of their imams and everyone in the village gets involved. Many houses are decorated for this event!

Every house prepares candy and treats for the kids. All of the kids and even lots of adults go house to house filling their bags with the treats! Some people say that it's like halloween in the States, but it feels really different for us. No one dresses up like characters. The children dress up in new clothes and the younger ones wear traditional clothes.

Faith is still young enough to dress up in traditional clothes! It was fun to see her wearing this pretty dress again!

The festivities start after sunset so we got ready early and took a few pictures. The kids were watching the sun go down. They kept saying, "It's almost sunset! Can we go now?" It made me smile that they were so excited about it.

All of the kids Joseph's age wear jeans and a button shirt. Only the little boys wear thobes. I miss seeing him in a thobe! Last year he wore a thobe, but this year he's too big.

One house went all out and set up a booth with lots of balloons! They even had a little pool with some ducks in it! They were passing out watermelon and lots of other treats.

Here's a couple pictures of the kids going to doors for their treats. Usually ladies from the family would be sitting at a table just inside the doors.

I thought that the kids would say "Nasifa Halawah" when asking for treats just like we said "trick-or-treat" when I was a kid for halloween. But, we saw lots of kids saying it on their way out of the door.


This short video gives an idea of what it looked like:

Garga'oon from Tim and Jeni Saltzman on Vimeo.

Here's a cute picture of Faith with our friend's daughter, Marium. The girl in the purple dress is another friend, but I don't know her name.

Another picture of sweet Marium! I love this girl!

Here they are coming out of the door with their bags full of treats.

Some people would open their garage door and be sitting there waiting for the kids.

One friend used tinsel to make the word garga'oon in Arabic on a wall. I had to get a picture!

This picture cracks me up!

I'm pretty sure that this was Joseph and Faith's favorite part. We got home at about 10:30 that night so we told them that they could look at their treats the next day.

Faith was pretty excited about these tubes filled with juice.

Joseph organized his treats into categories: chips, gum, lollipops, toys, and juice tubes.