Honoring Holiday Traditions While Living Overseas

We get tons of questions from friends and family members about life overseas.  One of the more frequently asked ones is "How do you celebrate _____ overseas?" Whether it be Halloween, Easter, Thanksgiving or Christmas.  Having been through a year of celebrations now, I feel like we have found a good balance between honoring the important traditions of our family and the things we love most about the holidays and being open to a new type of normal.

I'll start off by saying that we are truly fortunate.  Because we are in the foreign service we have an Embassy staff that helps keep the "American" feel of certain holidays.  For example, they put on a wonderful Halloween festival yearly.  It allows our kids to dress up, "trick or treat" and enjoy fun and games.

Our Little Unicorns at the Embassy Halloween Carnival

Rosie The Riveter and James Dean heading to the Marine Halloween Party

They do this with Easter, Christmas, and other holiday celebrations as well.  It helps keep us connected to other Americans, our traditions, and takes away some of the loneliness that can accompany the holidays for some.

While these activities are invaluable, really the key to having a "Happy Holiday" while living overseas is figuring out that balance between linking old traditions with new ones. For example, last halloween, our kids carved pineapples for the holiday.  It was fun and they enjoyed the tradition of carving while embracing our new island.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday.  Back home Thanksgiving with my family meant more to me than any other time of the year.  I absolutely loved to be at my mom and dad's house for Thanksgiving.  The food is amazing and its practically the same menu I have been eating since I was old enough to remember.  I love that there is no other competition - no gifts, no extra parties... just a day to enjoy family.  My sister and I always do the black friday shopping when we are together.  It's hilarious, sometimes we buy a ton, sometimes, nothing.  Almost always we laugh hysterically and stay out all night! It is a time I cherish more than anything.  Thanksgiving last year was hard because I realized how truly far we are from friends and family, but it was also good.  It helped me see that it's a time to be thankful, and family can take on many different faces.  We celebrated with friends, we ate, laughed and enjoyed the day. This year, the friend's faces changed as happens in this lifestyle, but we still had an amazing time celebrating and counting our blessings with new friends.

Our "Friends"giving was such a fun way to enjoy yummy food and great company!

Blurry picture alert!  But a new tradition began this year.  Erik and the girls made the pumpkin pie for dessert!

Although "weight" is a big deal in our lifestyle, and can sometimes affect our decision to bring along "frivilous" extras.      We always make a point to decorate for every holiday.  It makes our home feel like ours and reminds us of all the fun ways to celebrate whatever the holiday may be. 

Last Christmas Erik's mom was here to celebrate.  It was a good first year because we had family here.  I didn't know how this year would go, but it was truly amazing.  I think we started a new tradition by putting our tree up REALLY EARLY. 

But it was fun, and we binged on hallmark movies and of course our favorite family classic Christmas movies.  We baked... a lot... we shopped, we wrapped gifts, we stuck close to our family traditions of eating on our china every night in the month of December.

I have shared Aunt Evon's Sugar cookie recipe HERE

Christmas Shopping at Pettah Market.

Our December Tradition of eating off of our fine china continued.

The family Elves found us, so of course they hid and caused mischief.

We did a family advent study, and participated in the Carols Service at church.

But we branched out some too.  There are many here, especially with the embassy construction that don't have families with them.  That meant we opened our home on Christmas Eve to some new faces. It was a magical night filled with laughs, lots of food and some great memories.  I am so thankful we got to meet even more new friends!

So now on to the point of this entire blog:

1.     The most important thing in this life is to realize that some things will never change no matter where you are.  There will always be people that need "family" to be around or a home cooked meal.  Those people may be other embassy families, they may be someone down on their luck, they may be someone experiencing their first Christmas/Thanksgiving/Mother's day without a loved one - who knows.  But we are called as Christians to offer hospitality.  And although that may look different from year to year, opening your home is a tradition in itself.

2.     You can honor your traditions anywhere in any way you like.  I didn't get to go black friday shopping with my sister, however, we face timed, we laughed together and we still had time to connect.  And as a family, we hung out poolside all day on "black friday" it was amazing and I enjoyed every minute of it.

"Different isn't always bad, different can be fun."  This is a saying that Anna's kindergarten teacher used to always tell the kids.  It's so true.  So your day may not look like it used to, it may not even look like it was planned to, but it can still be fun.  That is an attitude that you can choose.  It is hard sometimes, trust me, I know, but it can be so so good, if you commit to be positive about the experience.

3.     Just because you aren't sad doesn't mean you don't miss your family or your "old way of life."  I know for many foreign service families and expats, they grew up in this life, so following in their families' footsteps is just par for the course, but in our situation, we uprooted our family to embark on this adventure.  Our kids had life long friends, we had lifelong friends, we had family traditions, we had family that looked forward to holidays with us, planned around our schedule, tried to make any occasion special for our children.  They love us and were our biggest support group.  Leaving that was the hardest decision we ever made.  I have now spent two Christmases away from my parents, sister, brother-in-law, precious nephews and niece. We have been separated from cousins and aunts and uncles.  Did we miss them this year? Yes, terribly.  Did we spend some nights reminiscing about holidays of the past, either when we were children or even since we have been married?  Of course we did.  Were we sad?  No, we were not.  Why?  Because we didn't allow ourselves to be.  We decided that we were too blessed to spend any holiday fretting about not physically seeing family members.  We would connect with them via face time, we would pray for them, talk to them, then we would commit to making memories that our children will be able to reminisce about when they are  grown.  Whether or not they're spending the holidays with us or not.

I struggled with the title of this blog post because my first inclination was to title it something like making it through holidays as an expat or in a foreign country, something like that, but the truth is I didn't make it through.   The Lindholms thrived during this fall, Thanksgiving, and Christmas seasons.  And that will carry on into our new year.  Foreign Service life is hard, Sri Lanka is hard, but we are better for these experiences.

What are your some traditions that follow you anywhere? I wanna hear!