New York - In our global world, you can easily buy a turkey for roasting in Dubai or Beijing or Tokyo.
You can shop for Christmas trees in Bangkok, where stores play Christmas carols throughout December, a constant reminder that Santa can come to town even when you’re 12 874km from home.
November and December bring a bittersweet mash-up of holiday cheer and homesickness. Some families do fly home for the holidays, but that can be expensive and challenging, especially with school-age kids. “During the first few years when our kids were younger, we tried to travel home to visit with our families,” says Melindah Bush, who lives with her husband and three children in Singapore. “But the cost is expensive. And jet lag with children eats up the first week of the holiday.”
When going home isn’t a good option, how do families stay connected to their holiday traditions?
Here some people living abroad share their strategies for making the season as cheerful as possible:
Embrace adventure: For Theresa Starta, the holidays used to be easy.
She and her husband, Dan, both grew up in the Pittsburgh suburbs, and were used to seeing both sets of in-laws on major holidays. After they relocated to Dubai for Dan’s career, they flew home for several holidays with their two children. Then this year they moved to Shanghai, and the longer flight home just wasn’t practical.
So this year, the family will decorate their Shanghai apartment with a tree and other decorations to connect with the Christmas spirit. Then, when school ends in late December, they’ll head off on a National Geographic trip to Antarctica.
Theresa says her kids will miss being home with relatives and friends. But their excitement at trekking around Antarctica surrounded by penguins is enough to keep the homesickness at bay.
Build a family and friends: Pam Hurd’s family, now in Okinawa where her husband serves in the Marine Corps, takes a similar approach. Christmas has become synonymous with travel and for three holiday seasons they’ve travelled with American friends who have become like a second family. “We are so looking forward to spending this Christmas in Singapore and Malaysia with our friends,” Hurd says. Keep a few traditions alive: Bush spent much of her childhood in California, and her husband, Nathan, grew up in North Carolina, so their holidays in those warm places didn’t involve sledding or building snowmen. Now, in Singapore, she loves “preparing the (traditional) meal for somebody who’s never had it before” and was delighted to find that it turned out to be the group’s favourite.
Don’t try replicate the past: Lauri Barrett’s childhood memories of holidays in New Hampshire are Christmas-card perfect, but she’s learnt trying to replicate those memories with her global family (husband Lincoln from New Zealand and their nine-year-old daughters, both adopted from China) in Thailand just doesn’t work. So for Christmas, the family will travel to South Korea for a ski trip.
AP