As I have mentioned before, my husband is a professional hockey player, now playing here in Switzerland. We spend nine exciting months of each year in Europe, then three whirlwind months in Canada. As much as we adore our time overseas, it always requires some adjustment, spending holidays with people we’ve just met; new teammates and friends who become temporary family during special occasions. We also have had to learn to face life’s many ups and downs over Skype with mom, texts with friends, and via outlets like this blog. As an expat living in Germany and Switzerland however (some of the most popular destination countries in Europe), my husband and I have also been very fortunate to host many of our family and friends in our various overseas homes. We have hosted friends looking to discover the European nightlife, parents coming to make sure we have a proper Christmas, cousins coming to celebrate New Years Eve on the slopes, and friends of friends backpacking through. Each visitor has been very different and each visit has been uniquely memorable.
Posts tagged Christmas
Multi-Kulti Christmas
Irish Christmas
This past year, our international family became even more international when my husband’s sister married a man from Colombia. When we moved to Ireland in September, the family decided that we would all celebrate Christmas together in Galway this year. The flight was direct, and short, so we anticipated no big problems. Anyone who has not been living in a cave for the past month will know that we were wrong on that front.
In the weeks leading up to Christmas, I had discussions with my older two girls about whether we would do “American” or “Irish” or “German” Christmas. I was pushing for a little bit of each. The older girls wanted to open presents on the 25th, as is done here in Ireland and in the US. I preferred to open them on the 24th, especially because the grandparents were visiting from Germany. We had finally concluded that we would open the German presents on the 24th and the ones from Oma in America on the 25th. But the bad weather made that decision for us.
Can you ever go back home, …
… especially for the holidays?
It is the eternal question, isn’t it? And the holidays have raised the question once again in my family.
Mind you, I have not been home to celebrate Christmas for the last 11 years. That really is quite some time to be gone. The first year I had the excuse that my boyfriend (now husband) and I were going out West to spend time together before he left for Germany. We did just that celebrating Christmas in Las Vegas and then moving our way to San Diego, Los Angeles and spending New Years Eve in San Francisco with friends.
The year following I was a newlywed in Ludwigsburg, Germany having been married in the Town Hall only a few days before Christmas. Obviously my husband and I were not coming home for Christmas that year as we wanted to celebrate in our new home together. And somehow, every year following there was a different reason not to go home. Looking back on it the main reason was that we had my husband’s family nearby and it was easier (and less expensive) to have my mother come over for the week rather than my husband and me (and later with kids) fly to America. READ MORE »
Flavors of Christmas
Spending the Thanksgiving holiday with friends who have recently moved to Germany, I found myself thinking – yet again – „I am becoming sooo German.“ The topic of conversation was the abundance of deliciousness available at German bakeries; under contention was whether they are all as delicious as they look. In the end, we all agreed that German pastries are less sweet than American pastries, and the level of sweetness required to define „delectable“ was left to the individual. What I realized is that after 10 years of German sweets, the American fare is far too sugary for me. For the newly arrived, German pastries are lacking in about a pound of sugar each.
And now we find ourselves in the midst of the holiday season, when kitchens everywhere are bustling with cookie-baking and good cheer (and at our house, Glühwein too!) Something I have grown to love about my host country is Christmas baking. READ MORE »
The “German” Christmas pickle ornament
An American ad for a “German tree trimming tradition” – the glass pickle ornament. Photo © H. Flippo
Today’s fat Sunday newspaper brought me a reminder about an article I first wrote back in 2003 about the so-called German tradition known as the glass pickle Christmas tree ornament, aka die Weihnachtsgurke. Today my wife pointed out an ad (see above) for “glass pickle ornaments” in one of the numerous Christmastime ad inserts. The ad makes it sound like every German household knows about this “German tree trimming tradition.” But in many years of asking Germans about this Christmas tradition, not one has ever heard of it. In the five years since the article I originally wrote for my old About.com site, it has become even more obvious that this “German tradition” is actually something invented to sell Christmas ornaments.
The irony is that in the years since I first tried to debunk this myth, READ MORE »
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