After spending one Christmas apart from each other, I was so happy to spend our first Christmas together and also share English culture and traditions with M.
We flew up on an early flight from Heathrow on Christmas Eve and reached my parent’s by lunchtime. We were greeted with lots of food on the table (in fact our whole stay consisted of lots of food on the table!). Our Christmas Eve pretty much consisted of watching Christmas movies like Elf and Nativity. None of which M had even seen before so my sister Z had a lot of fun showing M which were the classics.
The weather in Scotland kept changing so much in the space of one hour!
This food makes a change to rice!
As M had been up at 4am we were both very tired and called it a night in the evening but not before putting out treats for Santa Claus and Rudolph and laying out our stockings.
In the morning we opened our stocking gifts, ate a huge ‘German breakfast’ (a tradition we had kept from living in Germany – aka a continental spread) and then unwrapped some presents left by Santa and then gifted each other. It was so much fun to see M joining in and being valued by all my family. I had brought M a calculator for Christmas and gave it to him early so he could use it. But I still brought up a Santa hat for him to unwrap on Christmas Day from me!
For those of you who saw my Facebook post where I announced I had a little surprise to share, this is when the surprise was given to me. Although, you will have to wait for my next post to find out what it is….
The rest of the day we ate, drank and also went for a walk on the beach. Then we had guests round for dinner and spend the evening playing board games. Boxing day also passed much like Christmas day. However, instead of a Christmas dinner it was now M’s turn to cook and wow my family with his left over turkey creation. We stayed in the kitchen for three hours and at the end he served the guests and my family two types of turkey curry, a courgette curry, alu dum, two types of naan breads and steaming rice (with a little help from me hehe).
The next day we left Scotland after our quick stay and arrived in London late last night. It feels good to be back home and back to work although it would have been fun to stay for longer. I am glad that M got to see some of my family’s traditions surrounding Christmas and I am looking forward to celebrating our first New Year together as well.
home sweet home
Readers – How do you incorporate your intercultural relationship with holidays and festivals?
