Thursday evening. Just after bedtime. A well-timed lull in the torrential downpours that had flooded all the local roads and very nearly prevented us getting home after school. I am sprinting up a slippery cobblestoned hill with a sleepy three-year-old butterfly on my shoulders, who is bopping the sharp corners of a little bag against my cheek and wondering at being out and about past dark. We are sweating in our rain gear, trying to keep up with an eight-year-old Batman and six-year-old Spiderman and their new friends Dinosaur, Soccer Player and a couple of Long-Dark-Coat-White-Wig-And-Face-Paints.
Our Halloween last year was much more chilled out. We had only lived in Turkey for a couple of weeks and the kids were (seemingly!) content with decorating cupcakes at home. Only recently have people started to become aware of Halloween here, and trick or treating door to door is nearly unheard of. (As are orange pumpkins – most here are kind of… grayish?) But as luck(?) would have it, we made some new friends this summer who live nearby in a large gated community full of expats and – voila! – “proper” trick or treating for Halloween.
The kids had fun and we definitely loved spending time with our new friends. But three guesses which version this introvert-at-heart mama liked better 😉
Introverted mama-ness aside for the moment, this is just one example of how, as a multicultural family that has lived in a couple of countries, our holiday traditions are… fluid.
In England, where we were until last year, some of the holidays were similar to what I celebrated in America as a child, though with some twists:
- Christmas is considerably more glitter-and-tinsel and less snow-and-evergreens. It’s more secular and universal (nearly everyone celebrates it regardless of their religion, and people would think it strange if you said “Happy Holidays” instead of “Happy Christmas”). Yet nearly every school’s winter performance is a nativity of some sort, some rather, um, quirky.
- Halloween – much more popular now than a decade ago – was more spooky gore and less clever costumes (the Brits love an excuse for “fancy dress” throughout the year, so perhaps they compartmentalize a bit).
- We celebrated Thanksgiving at home with friends, sometimes from many different countries, everyone always marveling at all the carbs in one meal. It got easier every year to find a turkey that far ahead of Christmas, when just about every British family has their annual big-bird-in-the-oven meal.
- There is no Independence Day in England, obviously, but there are a lot of parallels in the bonfires and fireworks surrounding Guy Fawkes Day in early November – just with more mulled wine.
Now that we are in Turkey things are getting even more interesting.
We get to experience the holidays and festivals that my husband grew up with. There are numerous days-long religious festivals whose timing changes every year with the lunar calendar, mostly celebrated by visiting deceased relatives at the cemetery followed by endless cups of tea and sweets on the sofas of various relatives within walking and driving distance until the hours of the day (and some of the night) have run out.
There are also many holidays commemorating important events in the Turkish Republic and the life of its founder Atatürk, as well as a Children’s Day. Many of these are marked with a day off for the grownups, but the children are expected to attend school in the morning for a couple of hours of song and ceremony.
Christmas has also made its way here recently – I saw decorations at the grocery store already this morning– though they label them for “New Years.” If I try to share with a Turk that in my home country we use trees and presents to celebrate Christmas and that New Years, though close in timing, is a separate holiday, they usually smile indulgently and assume that the rest of the world just misunderstands.
And so we adapt.
From home to home we have brought with us some of my traditions from growing up: most of our Christmas breakfast menu, my grandmother’s pumpkin chiffon pie at Thanksgiving, homemade birthday cakes. And we have adopted some of our own, such as scaling back on Christmas gifts and making gingerbread cookies.
But like many things in our life at the moment, it feels haphazard. Some choices were intentional, but most have just happened; some feel good but many feel a bit hollow or unsatisfying. We enjoy the family time for sure, but I fear that for the most part we are missing the meaning of what makes the holidays stand out from a regular day together.
‘Tis the season now, and it seems time (past time!) to start thinking about this more carefully. The kids are getting older, and they notice and remember things more and more every year. For us, holidays are a way to reinforce our unique identity as a family: to remember all parts of our roots no matter where we are in the world, and to remember our own values even when we might be surrounded by those who celebrate familiar holidays differently.
We’ll see where it takes us…