An Expat Christmas

Christmas time is when expats often miss home the most. Australians at home might take this opportunity to count their blessings and appreciate being home with family.  Or perhaps not.  Perhaps you are filled with envy and wish that you too were separated from your family by a 22 hour flight and thousands of miles of ocean on Christmas Day.

For Kate and me, Christmas abroad and with our husbands’ families, the festive season, as for everyone, has its highs and lows.  Here we each share ours with you.

Kate’s London Christmas:

Brussel sprouts – those horrible green balls that feature on every mother’s threat list, pretty much sum up Christmas in England for me. They have these on Christmas Day. On purpose. They also have weird mini sausages wrapped in bacon. Not on the barbecue as some homage to their colonial cousins – no, just because well, it’s Christmas. And then there is the hideous sounding three bird roast.  Chicken, goose and turkey.  All in one.  Yes, I realise that conjures up odd visions of a freakish looking giant bird with three heads (is that just me?) but it’s actually a supermarket creation – quelle surprise.

Christmas is a weird time to be an expat. Everyone around you has these long standing traditions and shared memories and you want them to share yours. I suppose it’s a bit like sharing Christmas with a new family – my husband is still horrified by the fact that my family spends all of Christmas morning in their pyjamas and that he is not excused. I am horrified by the fact that his family open all their presents AT THE SAME TIME. They don’t spend 15 minutes admiring each present like mine. I want to embrace the new, really I do – and after many years living in other countries I’m getting there – but it’s hard not to compare.

But if I’m being completely honest, then Christmas in London is the real thing. Wellingtons on, we went to pick our Christmas tree on Saturday. Proper smelling massive green tree. Then we got hot chocolates and later we wandered around the neighborhood with the Bear admiring the Christmas lights. (Sadly, his favourite was the gaudiest, most OTT display of lights – you’ve never seen so many Santas climbing up the side of one house. Not raising much of an aesthete there. ) But it was cold, and coming inside to the open fireplace and wrapping presents well, it does feel a bit like I’m living the Christmas from childhood stories. Minus the snow. Yes, there is an 8 to 1 chance of snow and I do love snow. But it is the SAME chance every year and I have yet to see the sweet white stuff descend on the big day. Unless you count Uncle David’s dandruff, which most do not.

Jacqui’s Christmas experience in Madrid:

Consumption of Jamon Iberico really hits its straps around Christmas time

Sometimes as an expat you can insulate yourself from your foreign surroundings with friends from home and a house with all the essentials imported from across the seas.  Christmas is the perfect time to do this for many but if Christmas as an expat means living in Madrid with a Spanish family you can forget about it.

My husband has ten aunts and uncles, ON ONE SIDE…and seven on the other.  That’s seventeen aunts and uncles, their husbands or partners, their children and at many family gatherings, their cousins, brothers and sisters from each of their respective ‘other’ sides of the family.  I pretty much think we’ve got all of the five million residents of Madrid covered by no more than one degree of separation.

Christmas Eve is spent with the slightly larger side of the family in a massive catering event.  It really would help to have an event organizer and more than a few people with walkie talkies and ear pieces to assist.   It’s like camp.  There are not enough places at the table (obviously!) so it’s a buffet affair.  Then there are activities – one of which, devastatingly, is all of the cousins lining up in order of age.  Any dignity I try and keep intact is lost when I find myself being placed second from the end of the line (yes eldest at the back!) and more than a few spaces from my husband.  This line is then brought to life by some kind of prayer/sing-along-congo-line of which I still don’t completely understand the purpose.  I just smile sweetly and drink myself stupid.

We continue the festivities the following day with Christmas lunch at the year’s appointed host for the other side of the family.  Much more tame if not for the reduced number of people as for the absence of congo lines (thank God, or, perhaps, more appropriately for the occasion, Christ).

Christmas is the time of the year when Spaniards go even crazier about pig than usual, splashing out on a full leg of Jamon Iberico in place of the usual slices from the delicatessen.  Everywhere one goes, one sees pig legs, complete with hoof, raised indelicately in the air.  Out of shopping bags, with groceries in the rear of the car, post Christmas in bins on the street.  It’s like some kind of morbid city wide pig can-can dance.

Madrid also celebrates Christmas, and rather more importantly, the arrival of the Three Kings on January 6, with nativity scenes in churches, shops and streets which range from the spectacular to the ridiculous.  My favourite is the annual nativity scene in Escorial, (a lovely town on the edge of Madrid) where the entire central pedestrian street is taken up with larger-than-life scenes of Bethlehem and the three kings crossing the rather incongruous desert landscape – papier mâché  palm trees, camels and elephants are planted along the snow covered ground.  Each day the three kings move closer to baby Jesus in his manger.  Frequently a key piece from an original set has been replaced by a doll that someone felt was appropriate but is actually completely disproportionate to the rest of the scene.  Thus you will see a giant child helping milk the cow of his now apparently dwarf-like father.

But at Christmas time, Kate and I both agree, we would give up the hilarity of nativity scenes, the chance of snow on Christmas Day and the congo lines for a game of beach or street cricket after Christmas lunch, for the sound of cicadas on Christmas night, Boxing Day at the cricket with Dad, and balmy nights out with friends.  And of course sitting around the table with our families, even if we usually are on the verge of killing each other.

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