Happy Thanksgiving (and Hanukkah, for that matter)! Every year since starting the A Lady in London blog, I have written about Thanksgiving in London, but this year I am going to do something different: talk about navigating the holidays as an expat, and all of the wonderfully embarrassing mistakes I have made since moving to the UK. Here goes…
Since today is Thanksgiving, we’ll start there. Brits seem to love the idea of Thanksgiving, and every year my non-American friends ask me to explain the holiday. As a token American in London, I am expected to recount the history of Thanksgiving, which is always entertaining. For them, anyway.
That’s because I usually start out like this: “Well, the first Thanksgiving was the celebration of the (first?) harvest in [fill in the blank with somewhere in New England],” and end up like this: “Pilgrims…Mayflower…Indians…er, Native Americans…planting things…was there someone named Squanto?…people didn’t starve…hats with buckles…everyone was thankful…turkey,” Eventually this devolves into me waving my hands in the air shouting “cornucopia!”, because there’s only one day a year when you can use that word, and I intend to make the most of it.
You see, as an American living in the USA, I learned the history of Thanksgiving when I was around five years old, and never actually had to recount it again. Like any cultural norm, it was always assumed that everyone knew what it was all about, and there was no need to go over the details.
Being an expat throws my hazy memory into stark relief, and like a badly edited Wikipedia page, goes some way in spreading false information about what Thanksgiving is really about. Never in my life have I wished I paid more attention in first grade.
Moving on to Christmas—the next annual opportunity for me to embarrass myself as an expat during the festive season—there is more fun to be had. When I first moved to London, I assumed that British Christmas and American Christmas were pretty much the same Christmas. I mean, it’s a religious holiday, after all. How different can it be?
Very different, apparently. Take Christmas crackers, for example. My family always had them at the dinner table on Christmas day, possibly because my grandmother was Scottish, and possibly because my mother loves to shop (probably a little from column A, a little from column B). So when I first saw the round ribboned tubes at a dinner party in London, I figured I knew what I was doing.
I picked one up, pulled both ends, popped out the surprise gift and paper crown, and looked up to find everyone at the table staring at me in horror. It was one of a long series of expat moments when I knew that I had done something wrong, and that nobody was going to tell me exactly what.
I gently set the cracker and its contents down, flashed my most sheepish “sorry, I’m a foreigner” smile, and waited. Slowly, each person at the table picked up one end of a cracker, offered the other end to someone else, and played a little game of tug of war. So that’s what I did wrong.
The next holiday that I have a chance to embarrass myself with is Easter. Again, this one seems like a no brainer. Every year, I assume that everyone in the UK will go to church, have some kind of Easter lunch and/or Easter egg hunt, and generally do religious or cultural things all day.
Instead, I find myself in a country that gives people two full days off work for the Easter holiday and yet seemingly does nothing to celebrate it. Almost everyone flies to southern Spain or Portugal for spring sunshine, and those left behind have family lunches like they do every Sunday.
This year the country took things to a whole new level when the annual Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race was held on Easter Sunday, and nobody (except for me) seemed to think that it was strange. As an expat who walked around asking everyone what their Easter plans were, I was a bit embarrassed when I seemed to be the only one aware of the holiday itself (and I’m not even religious).
Last and most importantly is Mother’s Day. How could I possibly screw up Mother’s Day, you ask? I wondered the same thing. It’s not like my mother is British or anything. Surely as an expat I could get Mother’s Day right. Right?
Not so much. The main reason for this is that for some reason unbeknownst to me, Mother’s Day in the UK is celebrated in March (or February, or April, I’m not entirely sure). Every year this strikes me as odd, but not quite odd enough that I remember to pick up a card for my mother when there are actually Mother’s Day cards in the shops.
Come May, when America (and most of the rest of the Western world, for that matter) celebrates Mother’s Day, I always end up in the awkward position of buying one of those “blank inside” cards and trying to convince my mother that she is so incredibly unique and special that there wasn’t a single Mother’s Day card in the shop that could do justice to how happy a Mother’s Day I want her to have.
My mother is always the picture of politeness, never suggesting that her expat daughter in London screwed up (again), and didn’t have the foresight to buy a card three months in advance. For that, I thank her.
I also thank everyone around the world that has ever been patient with foreigners and expats like me, who routinely embarrass ourselves both during the holidays and during pretty much every other day of the year. We’re trying, I promise, and someday we just might get it right. In the meantime, this Thanksgiving I’m thankful for your understanding.
Sophie
November 28, 2013 at 11:12 am (3 years ago)This made me giggle, I love it 🙂
Sophie
xxx
A Lady in London
November 28, 2013 at 11:14 am (3 years ago)Thanks Sophie!
Belinda
November 28, 2013 at 11:23 am (3 years ago)Whelp, I have been in your shoes for every single one of these holiday missteps. Glad I am not alone! 😉
A Lady in London
November 28, 2013 at 11:42 am (3 years ago)Thanks! I’m glad I’m not alone either!
Dannielle
November 28, 2013 at 11:36 am (3 years ago)haha, so my life! now so I don’t forget, I buy two mothers day cards, send her one for english mothers day, and then another for american mothers day, and say she’s so special she gets two! Also, I throw around cornucopia like nobody’s business too, and make a “friendsgiving” dinner.
A Lady in London
November 28, 2013 at 11:42 am (3 years ago)I love it! Glad you can relate!
Bailie @ The Hemborg Wife
November 28, 2013 at 11:43 am (3 years ago)Just today I wrote in my post about Pilgrims and had to give a disclaimer that I was going with information I learned as a child and never took the time to verify!
A Lady in London
November 28, 2013 at 12:07 pm (3 years ago)Nice, that’s great!
Meg
November 28, 2013 at 11:46 am (3 years ago)What a great recap!! As an Aussie in London I have found so many of the same quirks of the traditions from back home. People always assume that just because we all speak English have “similar” cultures that there’s no challenges, but it is the subtleties that makes all the difference!!! Happy Thanksgiving to you!! xx
A Lady in London
November 28, 2013 at 12:08 pm (3 years ago)Thanks Meg! I’m glad it’s not just Americans in London that have challenges!
Natasha von Geldern
November 28, 2013 at 2:31 pm (3 years ago)LOL being an expat is great for providing other people with entertainment. I love how Americans seem to assume the whole world will know about Thanksgiving, when in fact most of us have never given it a first thought. I’ve got plenty of embarrassed Kiwi in London stories, like the time I put “tramping” as a hobby on my CV. In New Zealand tramping is the word used for hiking or trekking. Those interviews were fun! Nice to find your blog!
A Lady in London
November 28, 2013 at 3:35 pm (3 years ago)Haha, that’s great! I can imagine those job interviews were interesting!
Sara @ The Let's Go Ladies!
November 28, 2013 at 3:24 pm (3 years ago)Happy Thanksgiving, Julie!
The cracker story made me laugh out loud! Until I read it I can honestly say I had never thought of opening one by myself before – in Canada we do the tug o’ war thing too. Live & learn, amirite?
~S
A Lady in London
November 28, 2013 at 3:36 pm (3 years ago)Haha, yeah! Everyone says that when I tell the story. I guess it’s pretty widely know that you’re not supposed to open them yourself!
Betsy Transatlantically
November 28, 2013 at 7:23 pm (3 years ago)in 2011, Hanukkah overlapped with Christmas and I did dinner for Jon’s extended family – latkes, candles, blessings, the whole deal – on the 23rd. They’re CoE all the way and asked me to explain the story of Hanukkah and to talk them through all of the traditions and I’m pretty sure I made some of it up on the spot… haha!
(Luckily, since my family is Jewish, we’ve never had competing holiday customs: Jon and I will always be with my American Jewish family for Thanksgiving and we’ll always be with his English Christian family for Christmas!)
A Lady in London
November 29, 2013 at 8:48 am (3 years ago)That’s a great story!
Ayla
November 28, 2013 at 8:00 pm (3 years ago)Hahaha this gave me a good giggle! I don’t understand why you would pull a cracker with yourself though?! Where’s the fun in that?! That means you always end up with the gift!
A Lady in London
November 29, 2013 at 8:49 am (3 years ago)True! I have no idea why we always did it that way!
GirlIndependent
December 2, 2013 at 10:38 pm (3 years ago)When I was a “Lady in New York” I had the opposite problem with Mother’s Day! Except when my mum came to expect a card, I’d have to have bought it 9 months ago to have any chance of pretending to her that I’d remembered….
And I think I prefer Easter in the Uk – as I’m not religious, I don’t think you should need a God holiday to remember to enjoy time with your family – I should remember to do that anyway at normal weekends in the year – plus I get a long weekend to do fun stuff with! Hurrah!
A Lady in London
December 3, 2013 at 8:26 am (3 years ago)Agreed! I think you probably have it worse for Mother’s Day on that side of the pond. I also like your philosophy on Easter.
Noelle
November 25, 2016 at 8:39 am (5 months ago)I laughed out loud reading this! I too was confused on Mother’s Day… I think it’s in February (when its gross and cold) instead of May, doesn’t make sense to me. I also recently got asked about Thanksgiving and was sort of like “umm… it’s a nice meal with the Native Americans that we liked?” haha. Glad people are patient with us!
A Lady in London
November 27, 2016 at 5:58 pm (4 months ago)I’m glad you can relate. Being an expat is tough sometimes!