Inspired by** John Mace’s** Any non-US folks celebrating Thanksgiving today? thread, does anyone here celebrate any foreign holidays? That is, any national holiday from a country other than the one you were born/are currently living in, or a cultural holiday from a different culture than your own?
I have no idea why anyone would—I mean, aside from the obvious, like expatriates and immigrants—but I’ve learned long ago never to underestimate the human capacity for weirdness.
So, any native Chileans celebrating Waitangi Day? Or a full-blooded Inuit observing Passover?
Lots of people over here in Finland celebrate Halloween. It’s a good excuse to dress up and get drunk, not that we need a reason to do either. Kids don’t go around asking for candy though. We do that on Palm Sunday when kids go door to door dressed up as Easter witches and exchange Pussy willow branches, that they decorated, for candy and coins.
Schools in Spain celebrate Halloween: families don’t.
My parents always celebrated St George according to Catalan customs which have eventually spread around much of Spain (as “the day of books and roses”), but Mom is Catalan and they’d adapted it: Dad used to give her, instead of a single red rose as custom calls for, one rose per year they’d been married, but at one point he adapted it further by changing to carnations because “with the prices they charge for roses on this date, I could buy you a rose garden at any other time”.
Our family eats Thanksgiving dinner each year - a remnant of the year spent in Syracuse, NY when I was little. Hey, the food’s good.
Like my esteemed Finnish colleague posted above, Halloween is getting to be somewhat popular here because it gives people an excuse to dress up and drink, instead of just drinking in regular clothes like we normally do.
Incidentally, the “day of books and roses” is also in Finland, it’s organized by the Finnish Book Publisher’s Association.
As an American Jew, most Synagogues celebrate Israeli Independence day (Yom Haz’zmaut), here in the US. We make particular note of it in my family as my father was a soldier in the Israeli army in 1948.
My friends and I often throw a party on Australia Day. We play pickup cricket and drink a bunch of beer. It doesn’t hurt that we often have a visiting Australian in the crowd.
He swears that if you have a beer in one hand, you get one bounce to catch the ball. Who am I to argue?
For years, I always had a hankering to continue celebrating Children’s Day and hang cute cloth carp outside in May, which we had done when we were stationed in Japan.
These days I celebrate Tet, because it’s a big deal to my SO and our kids and that side of the family.
I have been known to drink a Guinness or four on St Patrick’s Day. Mainly when I was a student though. Halloween as we currently celebrate it is certainly an American import, even if it’s based on old traditions from the British Isles.
I remember singing the La Marseilleise (sp?) on Bastille Day at school, but then it was during a French lesson
For several years I used to have a party on Maslenitsa – a Russian folk holiday that is associated with Lent, but predates Christianity. You serve blini, sweet pancakes, and other circular foods that represent the sun’s return.
It’s in February and is a nice occasion for a party in the dreariest part of winter, which is very dreary indeed in Michigan, where I lived at the time. I studied Russian in college, and my Russian Club would always have a Maslenitsa party – so I decided to continue the tradition.
I haven’t done it in years, but it was a lot of fun.
Slight hijack, but: As a kid, I always found the way that American synagogues and Hebrew schools encourage identification with Israel to be vaguely creepy. Heck, mine used to end every day with the Israeli national anthem - which probably has a good claim to be the world’s most musically interesting anthem, but still. We’re Americans, not Israelis - it seems inappropriate to encourage this level of identification with a country that, after all, has interests and priorities distinct from those of the United States.
I celebrated St Andrew’s day yesterday by having a wee dram (I have no idea exactly what it was as I just told the (Aberdonian) barman to hand me a good whisky and forgot to ask what it was).
Maybe I should drink a bottle of Koskenkorva next Monday, 6th December.
Interesting perspective. I loved it, personally. Compared to my friends who identified so strongly with being Irish or Italian, identifying with Israel (and the concept of right to return) felt solid and more real to me than just having Eastern-European Jewish customs. My parents were born and raised in Poland (as Jews) but clearly we didn’t identify with being Polish. We were strongly Ashkenazic Jews, but connecting to Israel was another way to express my culture, not just my religion.
