Due to our busy schedule since January, our Christmas tree (once a fresh tree) got to stay with us longer than usual. Just 3 months!!! This gave me the idea to mix and match the cultures that are both embedded and essential in my life. And here is the result, my 7 Ss for 1399 Persian new year on a fresh Christmas tree.
The following is what I wrote sometimes ago for what your celebrations become when you immigrate to a new country with a different culture:

24 years ago, I left Iran with a precious bag. Not the one that I was holding on my shoulders nor the the one that I checked in at the airport. A bag invisible to the eyes of others, a bag that I was holding very tight in my heart and contained very carefully-selected memories of everything that mattered very much up until that moment in my life my friends’ and family’s love and what had made me what I was at that point, my family’s culture.

I knew that I’m holding a treasure box as it will never be the same and will age with me. 

I knew that I will open it when I need to be pulled back in time and drown myself in a time when I had a smaller world surrounding me, when my heart wasn’t stretching half way around the globe, when my world could fit in a circle with 100 miles of radius. 

I was a curious seed, planning to cross many countries and ocean, looking for a different garden with different soil, and weather to settle down deep in the ground and call it my home.

Adventure started right when I stepped out of the airplane. The cold breeze in my face was just a tiny hint of what was ahead. It was mid November and technically we were still in Fall and thinking of winter was an immature idea in my head.

We didn’t decide to stay home, but we can decide on how to spend our time while staying at home (hopefully not catching the virus and not passing it). What is upon us, is a unique situation which doesn’t happen that often and many of us has only read about precedent incidents in history books.
Time to time the world get tired of standing tall and strong and need some down time. And it takes all of us with itself in this journey and very unfortunate that some of us don’t bear the journey.
This is a painful knock on our conscious, may we get a better understanding that how deeply we are all connected, how strongly we are fragile, and how carelessly we are in denial. There is an invisible chain wrapped around our ankles connecting us to things beyond our surrounding people. As free as we feel we are, our actions/reactions/words carry a huge load of responsibilities.
A tiny tiny virus could cause a pause in our lives all together and more serious side effects if we don’t act together, if we don’t understand how influential is our role in a society that we are sharing with people in all range of health and age.
This tiny tiny virus is the image of pure truth, no bluffing, no pretending, no denial, no hiding is able to shield its reality.
Let’s stay home as part of our social duties, everything can wait for a safer time for all of us.
And special thanks to the same social media that once was blamed for disconnecting us from our surrounding world which now has come to our rescue in this social distancing time to let us stay connected virtually.