Tonight is a special one because of a special guest; Yalda night has brought joy and happiness to Iranian homes. Yalda is the longest night of the year that Iranian people celebrates it together with happiness and traditional customs from ancient. However I’m not going to write about Yalda (Shabe Chelle in casual language) as you can find much about that by just a googling on it, but in addition, just know that Yalda is also a girl’s name in Persian. I don’t know who made all the beautiful things feminine or putted all the beautiful names to girls. [They were instinctively right!]
At 7 pm in Yalda night, my sister called me:
Sister: We are in grandpa’s home, come here, we are waiting for you.
Me: I’m in short of time, you know, I’ve already told you that I don’t go anywhere.
Sister: Grandpa and Grandma are asking about you, they’re gonna to be unhappy if you don’t come. Come for dinner and go back early.
Me: Give my deep apologizes to them and explain my situation. I would lose in my exams if I miss these hours.
Sister: How can you tell this while you were asleep all the morning!?
Me: I was asleep all the morning because I stayed up all the night studying. Now I’m in the mood of studying and I want to keep it. I’ll go home when I was tired, maybe at midnight. So, tell me, do you know what is the limit of an n-gon when n approaches infinity?
Sister: I USED TO KNOW, BE HERE IN 30 MINUTES OR….
Me: YES MUM.
Customs are very good, but sometimes they come in awkwardly, especially when you can not avoid them. Some customs are very strong here, like Yalda and holiday of Nowrooz. I have never could benefit these times to do something productive because if you try to do you have to swim against the river flow.
Lets come back again to Yalda, one of the customs is to eat some watermelons in this night, it’s used to believe that if you eat watermelon in Yalda, you don’t get thirsty in next summer, so still people buy and eat Yaldamelons. Look what message one of my friends sent me: “You are so handsome, you are so attractive. This is your watermelon for Yalda!!”
If you havn’t got it, just consider the old Persian proverb “Putting watermelon to somebody’s armpit (Hendevane zire baghale kasi gozashtan)”. You put watermelon to somebody’s armpit when you cheat or lie him.
The oldest Yalda I can remember comes back to when I was 5 years old. I remember when my mother told me it’s the time to go to bed, I replied: “Mother, tonight is the longest one, we have too much time tonight enough to stay up more.” I used to believe that the night is as long as a week or maybe a month! And when my mother told me that it may be longer just for a minute, I thought foolish.
It would be great if the Yalda could be the night that I could study same as I study in a week or month if it cannot be as long as a week or month!
