Moving to a country whose culture is totally alien to your own does not necessarily mean you have to temporarily suspend your own cultural traditions. To enjoy living abroad in general you need to be sensitive, creative and have a sense of humor. And in celebrating your cultural traditions in a foreign environment you also need a certain amount of imagination too.
Just because you have always done things in a certain way in your home country does not mean that you have to stop all the traditions because you can not get every standard ingredient when you are abroad.
Trying to ignore a certain important festival in your culture may seem like the best option, but it can often backfire. My wife tried ignoring Christmas one year, she was in the depths of China where it was relatively easy, but it did not work out as she had thought. She now says that, "It was the most miserable Christmas I've ever known."
So what do you do if some vital ingredient of your festival is missing. Or worse still, what if you are in a country where the festival you want to celebrate is actually banned? What about if you are the only person in your area who will be celebrating the festival?
Improvise. Use your imagination. Then get on and organize something.
In many countries you'll probably find that your local friends will be more than willing to help you enjoy your special holidays by telling you where to find essential ingredients or offering other forms of help. Here are three stories of how people have celebrated Christmas in unusual places.
A Chinese Christmas
The year after my wife tried ignoring Christmas, she was still in China and there only three other foreigners living in the city where she was. But instead of limiting the celebration to the four people in the city, all the foreigners that new each other in the whole province traveled, for up to two days, to one place. The various colleges that the foreigners worked at gave them special leave of absence at a time that was not actually a Chinese holiday, as they understood it was an important date in the western calendar.
Dinner was certainly not your traditional Christmas fare, but everyone had a great time, even the vegetarians at the traditionally carnivorous festivity. The twenty-two people all brought a small present for everyone else and they danced the night away to Jazz.
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