The holiday season can be can be a lonely affair for a backpacker, with too many sad souls sipping cheap pitchers at the hostel bar, munching on things in crinkly bags with relative strangers and longing for home, white snow and the smell of evergreen trees.
This needn’t be your lot as a backpacker! Spending the holidays away from home is a rare opportunity to reinvent Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa or whatever it is you’re celebrating, and to begin new traditions (hello, mimosas with breakfast!) and dispense with the ones you never liked anyway (bye bye, fruitcake!).
It may take just a little extra effort to make the holidays abroad something worth celebrating, but it may also be the most memorable one yet.
1. Find some friends
Even if you have to hoof it to the other side of the country or jump on a plane to join up with friends in Thailand, it’s fundamental to find friends over the holidays.
This might also mean skyping with your family and friends back home. Share their holiday magic, ask what gifts they’re giving and who’s hosting on the big day. There’s nothing quite like family to get you in the spirit.
2. Plan to stay somewhere cozy
If you haven’t got an apartment of your own and the hostel you’re staying at is anything less than festive and comfy, move somewhere else! Take a hotel for the night or move to a nicer hostel. Being somewhere cozy and warm on Christmas morning will make all the difference.
Rent some of your favorite holiday movies and indulge in a few with your favorite treats. Share them with friends and watch their favourites too.
3. Plan a party on the big day
Get a group together and plan something at your place or someone else’s, even a restaurant if necessary. Go easy on the booze and heavy on the caroling and carousing (something’s got to distinguish Christmas from New Year’s, after all). A holiday party is sure to get you in the spirit.
You don’t want to find yourself moping around the house alone on Christmas morning, wishing you had someone to share a glass of champagne with. Plan ahead. Plan to laugh, eat holiday food and have a gay old time.
4. Bake stuff
Our sense of smell is deeply connected to our emotions. It’s called olfactory memory. We make most of these memories as children, but they stick with us for life. This memory is connected to the amygdala, which is what processes emotion in the brain.
Call your mom and ask her how she makes the rugelach at Hanukkah. Get your grandma’s recipe for sweet mustard sauce for your Christmas ham. Fry up some okra for Kwanzaa, whatever gets you into that secure, happy place of childhood.
5. Go out and find a tree, dreidel or menorah, however inconvenient
If you’ve had a tree every year since you were a wee young thing, it’s probably something that’s pretty important to you during the holidays. So go buy a tree. Living in a small apartment? Then get a small tree and deck the halls with garlands and hang stockings from the windowsill, whatever it takes.
Family traditions are what make the holidays feel like the holidays. So while you’re busy inventing new traditions with your new friends, embrace some of the old.
6. Find a place to eat traditional holiday foods
International hotel chains will often do holiday meals for foreigners who are traveling abroad during the holidays. Think Hilton, Ritz-Carlton, Shangri-La or Sofitel, all of whom do Christmas breakfast and dinner. If a holiday turkey is important, gather some friends together and splurge on a nice meal out. That olfactory memory stimulation is sure to give you a boost.
7. Give a different kind of gift
Let’s face it – at some point you’re probably going to go home, as are many of the other backpackers and expats in your circle of friends. Either you’re throwing away those well-meaning gifts or you’re paying for an extra piece of baggage to lug home all the trinkets you only kinda liked in the first place.
Try sharing your favorite moments with friends on pretty cards, exchanging travel tips, or swapping air miles. If you need to wrap and unwrap some stuff, try a gift exchange instead. All the pretty wrapping paper and none of the excess baggage cost!
6. Give yourself a gift
Any kind of gift. It might be a gift for your home, a night in a nice hotel or a day at the spa. Whatever you fancy, bite the bullet and do it, even if it costs you a bit of coin.
Whichever traditions you really love the most, those are the ones you should be going out of your way for. Do your best to recreate them, even if it means flying up to northern China where there’s snow and you can ski and make snow angels.
One of the best things about being away from home is that you get to create your own schedule. No more lumpy gravy at Grandma’s at 11 a.m. while nursing a holiday hangover. The holiday is yours now. You get to say where you’ll spend it, who you’ll spend it with, what you’ll eat and how much champagne you’ll drink. And that’s a pretty fair compromise.
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