Egyptians upper and upper-middle class have an imported rituals problem

Last Wednesday I was celebrating my last working day (before starting my short vacation and moving on) with my coworker, he suggested that we can do it around the workplace, which happens to be a common open-air outing for the Egyptian middle to upper-middle classes. It was quite fun.

As we walked around, I noticed dozens of Christmas trees scattered across which felt oddly dissonant. Familiar, but still entirely out of place.

I understand why I’m writing this blog in English, and why I can relate to European drama more than I can to my local ones; English is lingua franca, and I was exposed to foreign culture more than I was to my local one. But what I don’t understand is this strange eagerness to inherit symbols that were never ours. I found a lot of Christmas trees at work yesterday. I think they were the usual Picea abies, a tree that has never grown naturally in the landscapes of the Middle East: not in our deserts, not along our Mediterranean coastlines, not even in the highlands. Even Middle Eastern Christians, for nearly two millennia, never practiced this tradition; it spread only recently through the soft power of American and Northern European culture. The tree itself has origins in pre-Christian pagan rituals of northern Europe, symbols of winter vitality adopted and reinterpreted over centuries, yet we imported it without the mythology, without the climate, without the story.

The same happens with Halloween, a Celtic festival marking the thinning veil between worlds, reshaped by Irish immigrants in the US, and then exported back to the globe through a cultural gravity the MENA region was never meant to orbit. It’s not that these borrowed traditions are wrong; they are simply unrooted. They give the illusion of participating in a universal culture while quietly eroding the questions that shaped our own. Perhaps the real issue is that we’re adopting symbols that grew from someone else’s winters and someone else’s fears.

My biggest issue, though, is that I cannot find authenticity in this or enjoy it, because it feels totally engineered by media. Perhaps I would find it fun if I were born in the US (even as a Muslim, in fact some people in Egypt attributed my thoughts about these events to radical Islam, it has nothing to do with it. I would celebrate an authentic Egyptian holiday for instance), for example. Experiencing it from here, however, feels like watching someone else’s memory and pretending it’s mine. It makes me wonder whether culture today is something we choose or something curated for us, shaped and streamlined until we mistake repetition for belonging.

When every tradition can be packaged into a trend, it becomes difficult to tell where genuine fascination ends and subtle social engineering begins. If a ritual becomes universal through marketing rather than meaning, does it still count as culture, or is it simply a very successful advertisement?

At what point do we stop being participants in culture and become mere receivers of whatever is most efficiently broadcast?