My mother called me from Pakistan to wish me a happy Thanksgiving. “Hello Foosie,” she said when I picked up the phone. “Happy Thanksgiving. We’re all here about to eat our turkey and we’re thinking of you.”

“You’re having Thanksgiving dinner in Islamabad?” I asked, a bit surprised that they would be celebrating Thanksgiving in Pakistan. “Do they even have turkeys there?”

“Well not exactly, but you know Mimo. She’s arranged the whole thing.” Mimo had moved back to Pakistan in the mid 1990s. “She found us a wild turkey and had it plucked and prepared to go in the oven. She’s even made stuffing and mashed potatoes and gravy and cranberry sauce!” my mother said happily. I couldn’t see her, but I could tell she was smiling.

My sister Mimo is trained in hotel and restaurant management. She loves cooking, planning, and all things entertaining. She will throw a party for just about any reason. In college she had monthly full moon parties. It was probably her enthusiasm that made my family embrace Thanksgiving as our favorite American holiday.

Mimo knows how to throw a good party.

When my mother died several years later in December of 1999, I immediately made arrangements to fly back to Islamabad from Boston where I was living. Ami had been sick for a while with another recurrence of cancer, so her death was not a surprise to any of us, even though she was a young sixty-four years old.

When she died, Mimo was in the middle of planning a Christmas celebration at her house. She put the planning on hold and we attended all the funeral services, which like Pakistani weddings, last several days. Men and women were segregated in different parts of the house. Women, dressed in white, were clutching prayer beads as they prayed and wailed in grief. I didn’t know who many of them were and took the greatest comfort when we would go back to Mimo’s house with some of our cousins and sit around the kitchen table, ordering in Chinese food and remembering the joyful times in our mother’s life. We had many good laughs in those moments, tender and poignant. We were not filled with grief, but rather the memories of our mother and how fully she embraced life.

After the services were over, Mimo went back to planning Christmas. Although we celebrated many American holidays, Christmas was not one of them. We were Muslim after all.

“I’m having a tree cut down and we’ll trim it with ornaments and lights,” Mimo was explaining.

The guest list included us four sisters, our brother Tito who was also in town for Ami’s funeral, our close friends and their children as well as Puchi’s boys. Our oldest brother, Baba, was not included since by now the relationship between the rest of us and him was deeply strained.

Mimo had arranged toys for all the kids, but before they could open their Christmas gifts they distributed flour, lentils, and sugar to communities living in deep poverty on the outskirts of the city. “That way they’ll learn the value of giving and receiving gifts,” Mimo said.

Her living room was going to be rearranged to accommodate a long table for the Christmas dinner and she was going to put a bar in the corner for the Christmas cocktails. It all sounded great to me, especially since I had left behind a series of holiday parties in Boston.

Meanwhile family and friends continued to call on us daily to condole the loss of our mother.

“Don’t you think it’s inappropriate to be having a Christmas party?” I asked.

“No, why?” Mimo said.

Did I really need to enumerate the reasons? “For starters, Ami just died and people are coming to your house every day to condole. And we’re Muslim. We’re not supposed to be celebrating Christmas,” I explained looking at her like I couldn’t believe she had not already thought of these things. “What if someone drops by on Christmas day to condole with us and they’ll see a Christmas tree with us celebrating Christmas, drinking cocktails and wine and otherwise being merry when we should be grieving the loss of our mother? I don’t think that will look good.”

“Good point,” she said. “We’ll have to move the party to Mona’s house. No one will come there to condole with us.”