Expat Holidays

I don’t get homesick very often. Aside from an early case of the Istanblues, I love living abroad and all the strange adventures that come along with that. I miss my family madly but Skype makes it easy to talk. Generally, I am a very happy expat.

But there are some American holidays that I really miss as an expatriate. The Fourth of July is just a day on the calendar outside of the US. The mad surreal carnival night of Halloween is not a normal thing in Istanbul. I had to explain to a coworker that Thanksgiving is not a religious holiday.

Being the resilient gal that I am, I try to create a nouveau-holiday here in my new home. Just because Turkey isn’t celebrating Independence Day doesn’t mean I can’t! Just because I don’t know where to get a turkey in Turkey doesn’t mean it can’t be done!

The first major holiday I really missed (besides the springtime Monday boozy holidays of Patriots’ Day and Memorial Day, one of which turned out to be very scary this year anyway) was Fourth of July, American Independence Day. I bandied about the idea of throwing a July 4^th-style barbecue, but the lack of a grill and outside space, plus a weird dearth of American friends, put a damper on my plans. Apparently I mentioned it to a lot of people, though, because the morning of July 4^th began with a slew of text messages from friends asking about my July 4^th party. And with that, it was ON.

I scrambled to get together a feast, and ended up making white bean salad, devilled eggs, mint lemonade, homemade burgers, and a peach salsa. (We tried to have corn-on-the-cob as well, but the corn was horrible and we just tossed it.) It was frantic and last-minute, but hugely fun; my party guests (British, Turkish, Malaysian, and American) enjoyed the food and we finished the night with evening beers at sunset on the Moda Seaside. Sure, it’s not fireworks, but it was pretty spectacular regardless.

(All the rest of the pictures from this celebration were on the roll that got away. Alas.)

Halloween has always been one of my favorite holidays—I am a sucker for the surreal, and Halloween always seems to bring out a lot of latent weird. I was determined to have some Halloween fun in Istanbul. Luckily, my friends at Yabangee (Istanbul’s expat website) were throwing a big party in Taksim. I made my own costume (I was a cat, which was supposed to be an inter-linguistic Turkish-English pun that no one over the age of 5 understood, oh well) and was pleased that Taksim Square had a rather large number of people in costume! The best costume I saw was a guy dressed in a full Jason Varitek Red Sox uniform; this was the day they’d won the World Series and he was the first American I’d seen all day, so we had nice little Boston victory dance. The worst costume I saw was a guy dressed in full Nazi regalia, and I was honestly too freaked out to go up to him and ask him WHY he thought that was a good idea. On my way home, a Turkish man started meowing at me, which I thought was incredibly rude… until I remembered that I was dressed as a cat.

This year was my first Thanksgiving away from my family, and I embraced the challenge of creating an expat holiday dinner. I also got lucky—one of my American friends offered to host the dinner AND acquire the turkey. Many apartments in Istanbul, including my own, don’t have ovens; my friend’s does, so that was a tactical problem averted. I cooked beet risotto and pumpkin-curry-coconut soup; I ate turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes; I spent the evening giddily drinking red wine with a whole bunch of fascinating expats (American, Turkish, Spanish, Indian, British, etc.) Thanksgiving is about family, and we created a temporary family for each other: our evening bubble of expatriates, trying to cook a turkey in Turkey, creating a new togetherness.

My blurry and delicious beet risotto.

I love the challenge of re-contextualizing the holidays that are important to me, and I love sharing them with my community here. It’s all about how you approach the situation: every slight heart-pang I feel from being far away is immediately combated with a determination to make something new, lovely, and a little different. My expat holidays aren’t the same as their US equivalent… but they are, inevitably, extraordinarily special.