![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
New Year away
Fri, Jan. 21st, 2011 07:17 pmWritten for Potluck.
Note: I didn't double check my pinyin, so the spelling here might be atrocious.
Late January and early February is always a bad time for me in the US. I never mind spending Thanksgiving or Christmas with friends or away from home, and half the time I don't do much for Christmas anyway. But New Year is different.
I wasn't always like this. When I was growing up in Taiwan, we did get December 25th off... but because it was the ROC's Constitution Day. We would celebrate in school by giving classmates cards and presents on Christmas Eve, and my family was one of the ones that had brought our artificial tree back from the US. I think every year we lost an ornament, and I refused to buy any in Taiwan because they were plastic, not glass. Eventually, my parents got sick of setting up the tree, and it was just me and my sister, then finally, just me. After I moved to the US for college, I stopped too. It seemed important when we were in Taiwan; the bulk of people at my school had grown up partially in the US before moving to Taiwan.
For Thanksgiving, the moms would occasionally set up a potluck lunch, where we would bring mashed potatoes, gravy, turkey, and, for some reason, 米粉. No one knew how to make anything, and frequently, the mashed potatoes and gravy were from packages or powder. The turkey was difficult to find; I'm fairly sure we always got a pre-cooked one, since very few people had an oven large enough to fit one.
My first "real American Christmas" (quotations because it's not like my Christmases in the US with my family pre-Taiwan were fake) was with my white American boyfriend's family, in which they had a real tree, nutcrackers, a giant feast, stockings, and the whole deal. Ditto my first "real American Thanksgiving." I think that's when I stopped trying to celebrate Christmas in Taiwan: it was clearly not my holiday in the way it was for other people here, and I didn't care enough to try and adopt it. My family has never done the giant Christmas feast, nor has almost everyone I grew up with, and though we had our potluck lunch Thanksgivings, it wasn't with commercials and sales and crowds at the grocery store, turkey and cranberries everywhere. For us, we didn't have cranberry sauce for a while until they started imported the canned stuff (which, btw, I love).
( New Year )
Note: I didn't double check my pinyin, so the spelling here might be atrocious.
Late January and early February is always a bad time for me in the US. I never mind spending Thanksgiving or Christmas with friends or away from home, and half the time I don't do much for Christmas anyway. But New Year is different.
I wasn't always like this. When I was growing up in Taiwan, we did get December 25th off... but because it was the ROC's Constitution Day. We would celebrate in school by giving classmates cards and presents on Christmas Eve, and my family was one of the ones that had brought our artificial tree back from the US. I think every year we lost an ornament, and I refused to buy any in Taiwan because they were plastic, not glass. Eventually, my parents got sick of setting up the tree, and it was just me and my sister, then finally, just me. After I moved to the US for college, I stopped too. It seemed important when we were in Taiwan; the bulk of people at my school had grown up partially in the US before moving to Taiwan.
For Thanksgiving, the moms would occasionally set up a potluck lunch, where we would bring mashed potatoes, gravy, turkey, and, for some reason, 米粉. No one knew how to make anything, and frequently, the mashed potatoes and gravy were from packages or powder. The turkey was difficult to find; I'm fairly sure we always got a pre-cooked one, since very few people had an oven large enough to fit one.
My first "real American Christmas" (quotations because it's not like my Christmases in the US with my family pre-Taiwan were fake) was with my white American boyfriend's family, in which they had a real tree, nutcrackers, a giant feast, stockings, and the whole deal. Ditto my first "real American Thanksgiving." I think that's when I stopped trying to celebrate Christmas in Taiwan: it was clearly not my holiday in the way it was for other people here, and I didn't care enough to try and adopt it. My family has never done the giant Christmas feast, nor has almost everyone I grew up with, and though we had our potluck lunch Thanksgivings, it wasn't with commercials and sales and crowds at the grocery store, turkey and cranberries everywhere. For us, we didn't have cranberry sauce for a while until they started imported the canned stuff (which, btw, I love).
( New Year )