When you’ve adopted a kid from a culture different from your own, holidays can be a challenge. Both familiar ones and unfamiliar ones. (I mean familiar to the adults in the household.)

I’ve been thinking about this as we’ve made our sixth attempt to create a satisfactory Spring Festival season for our Chinese child. Of course, after living in China for years, we had some idea of how the holiday is often celebrated. However, the traditions we’d seen weren’t exactly the same as the ones our child participated in.

And, we’d never really had to put together the celebration for ourselves, since it wasn’t really our thing.

Now, of course, it has to be. And we’re trying.

We did the best when we could invite a big crowd over for snacks and fun–in pre-COVID times. Though that wasn’t much like the family-oriented celebrations we’d been guests at in China, our child celebrated with parties.

Now we muddle through with a smaller guest list. We hope our more restrained celebrations will still communicate that we love our child–and appreciate the culture he was raised in.

But we also understand how it’s easy to get depressed when holidays are happening back where you’re from. Particularly when hardly anybody knows or cares in the community around you. That’s the way it was for us around Thanksgiving and Christmas back in the day.

So, we remind ourselves to extend extra grace during the holidays. Because we know (since we’ve experienced it) that celebrating holidays in exile can be incredibly hard. It’s a glorious time, but also a sad time. A time of celebration, and also a reminder of all that you’re missing from the place that will always, at least to some degree, be home.