‘Merry Christmas’ in Persian, stencilled onto shole zard with cinnamon.

Why do some foods belong only to certain moments, and what happens when we move the frame?

Mehrdad Aref-Adib

A few years ago, a photograph I took went unexpectedly viral. It showed a dish of shole zard, Persian saffron rice pudding, with its golden surface dusted with cinnamon letters that spelled Merry Christmas in Persian.

The reaction made me think about how certain foods are bound to particular moments, and how taste itself becomes ritual. In Iran, shole zard is cooked when one feels thankful: after recovery, fulfilment, or a promise kept. Its colour, its fragrance of rosewater and saffron, and its slow stirring all make it a dish of devotion.

So why Merry Christmas on it?

Perhaps because living between cultures means the calendar is no longer fixed. Seasons overlap; meanings migrate. The gold of shole zard answers the same need as the lights of Advent, a wish for warmth and brightness when the world turns dark.

And the connection runs deeper than most people realise. Long before Christmas was marked as the birth of Christ, Persians celebrated the birth of Mitra, or Mehr, the ancient god of light, on the winter solstice. It was the moment when darkness began to recede and the sun was reborn.

When Christianity later spread through the Roman world, it kept that same date, the birth of the light. The celebration moved westward, but the symbolism of renewal, illumination and hope remained the same.

I have always felt a quiet kinship with that story. My own name, Mehrdad, means given by Mehr, or a gift from the sun. It carries that same lineage of brightness, a reminder that light, whether divine or human, is something we pass on.

And so, somewhere in this golden pudding, there is a hidden continuity: saffron, sun, light, rebirth. The Magi, or Three Wise Men, Persian astrologers who followed a star westward, were part of that same lineage of light. When I make shole zard at Christmas, its glow feels like a small echo of that ancient journey, warmth travelling across centuries and beliefs.

Every country I have lived in has its own edible calendar. In Turkey, as in Iran, helva is stirred for both mourning and blessing; in the UK, hot cross buns mark spring; in Spain, torrijas belong to Easter. In German Advent traditions, Stollen and Lebkuchen are classic sweet treats. These foods anchor emotion to time. They remind us what joy tastes like, and what grief feels like on the tongue.

But migration rewrites these calendars. To make shole zard for Christmas, and to write Merry Christmas across it in Persian, is to shift the frame. It’s a quiet insistence that gratitude and celebration can speak more than one language, that ritual can travel and adapt without losing its soul.

That day, the scent of saffron and rosewater filled the room. Outside, London’s lights flickered in the early dark. Inside, the golden pudding cooled, the words of one language settling gently into the script of another.

For a moment, home, distance, and the past glowed within the same frame.

Perhaps that is what Mitra, the Magi, and memory all teach in their own ways: that light has many names but one source, and that every act of sharing it is a kind of rebirth >>> Merdad Aref-Adib