The Best Eid Ever

I didn’t know what Eid was until I was about 25 years ago. I had never attended a seder dinner until about the same time. I only knew about Christian holidays – and even those were closely tied to the particular culture that I was raised in (Southern Baptist).

My children have a completely different experience. They are aware of Eid, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa. And within the Christian religion, they have attended holiday celebrations in a number of different types of churches from Quaker to Lutheran to Episcopal and Presbyterian. It’s important to me that they have interactions with other religions and other cultures and not just because of the richness that I think it brings to the lives in terms of education and socializing. I firmly believe that you can only really come to terms with your own choices about God and religion after you have a genuine understanding of what it means in a bigger context.

For the record, Eid is the biggest holiday of the Muslim year. It begins this year on Thursday, December 20 – the close timing within a week of Christmas remarkably happens only once every three decades.

Author Asma Mobin-Uddin sees that as a good thing, and it offers her a new platform to promote her children’s book, The Best Eid Ever.

The Best Eid Ever is about a young girl whose parents are at the Hajj pilgrimage, the once-in-a-lifetime trip to Mecca that is a requirement of Islam. While with her grandmother, she is distressed to discover that there are refugees in her town from a war-torn country and cooks up a plan with her grandmother to make their holiday “the best ever.”

Mobin-Uddin believes that the central themes of the book will appeal to more than just Muslims: “I wanted to share the spirit of generosity reflected in many different faith traditions. It’s a universal message. I wanted to empower kids to know you can do something to help somebody else to make a holiday special. And I wanted to share, on a child’s level, that awakening to people from different backgrounds.”

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Eid, Asma Mobin-Uddin, The Best Eid Ever, Islam