On Experiencing U.S. Holidays in Foreign Countries

We had a late American-style dinner for Thanksgiving 2019 at La Brasserie de Montbenon in Lausanne, Switzerland. Not a bad try for the Swiss, eh? November 28, 2019.

As U.S. native living abroad, it seems surreal to wander through the world at the Thanksgiving time of year and see no pumpkins, turkeys, pies, or orange-and-red leaves made from construction paper.

And when the holiday arrives and everyone else works and lives just as they do on any other Thursday, the world truly feels off kilter.

Likewise for the Fourth of July. Each county has a national day of one kind or another, it seems—yet these holidays don’t take place on July 4th. If you expect fireworks, flags, and cookouts in midsummer, expect disappointment instead. No one anywhere around you will do any of that rigmarole anywhere around that time (if ever).

When someone has lost daily connection with the United States, she won’t notice these out-of-sync holidays as much. A friend here in Lausanne who had long since left the United States said that she hosted a Thanksgiving for all her friends from the United States for years—and everyone took off work to celebrate—until she ran into a year when her tennis schedule interfered with her Thanksgiving schedule. After skipping Thanksgiving that first year, she never really thought much about the holiday again. She doesn’t have much around her to spark the planning.

However, when you engage with the United States daily, like me, you notice the holiday discrepancies acutely. And they feel very strange.

My U.S. business contacts will ask what I have planned for Memorial or Labor Day weekend. I’ll get wishes for a great 4th of July. I’ll receive e-mails with Thanksgiving promotions. All my social media feeds speak about little other than the holiday in question. My contact rhythms with U.S. family and friends change completely for the holiday period—while the world around me continues as normal.

It feels like living in an alternate universe. And I suppose I am.

I don’t miss Thanksgiving or the Fourth of July or Memorial Day or Labor Day or any of the others, to be honest. And, in many ways, I enjoy living in a place where my main points of contact go into holiday mode and yet I can still enjoy a city in the throes of a normal day or two, when people still do things and regular life continues. I can then enjoy the activities I don’t experience on most weekdays, because U.S. holidays mean I don’t have to work.

Examples: This year on Memorial Day, I escaped for a long lunch and an afternoon coffee with friends. It felt like playing hooky—and a nice change of pace. For this past Thanksgiving, I joined a writing group in the morning. Meeting my first creatives in Lausanne took me high.

I’ve long wanted to travel on the weekends of the major U.S. holidays, like Thanksgiving and Christmas—even before I moved abroad. After all, getting away from home can deflate the stress and pressure of these holidays—pressure that seems to only intensify as we get older. The recent years away from the United States during the big-holiday season came as a huge relief. I may not have traveled in the way I’d envisioned in the past (Fiji! African safari! Patagonia!), yet I got several of the hoped-for benefits of doing so.

I need to better plan so that I can make holiday-season travel happen in the future. This year, by the time I figured out what opportunities I still had for each of the two big holiday breaks, none of the options inspired me. (For example, Europe and November’s weather do not a match in heaven make.)

And so, let’s share a toast to foreigners abroad making new traditions in new places, especially for the home holidays not celebrated where we live. In a funny way, I feel like I have more opportunity to create my own traditions abroad than I did back in the United States. One big change can cascade into other big changes, no?

This was La Brasserie de Montbenon’s attempt at pumpkin pie. Not quite on the mark, but… interesting. Lausanne, Switzerland, November 28, 2019.