Holidays

If all the year were playing holidays/To sport would be as tedious as to work.” --Shakespeare

The houses are outlined with blinking lights; representations of Santa and Baby Jesus are plopped into people’s front lawns; stores blare out “Silent Night,” “There’s no place like home for the holidays,” and my personal favorite “Grandma got run over by a reindeer.” It is Christmas time in America.

Every culture that I am aware of celebrates holidays. Anthropologists often compare culture to an iceberg, and place holidays along with cuisine in the tip of the iceberg. The implication might seem to be that these are only superficial elements of culture, and reveal nothing of the real nature of the thing, that just as 97% of the iceberg’s mass lies beneath the surface, invisible to the naked eye, so too in order to get at the essence of a culture we must look beyond the obvious elements of diet and ritual.

Such a depiction is itself superficial. Far from being irrelevant, surface appearances can serve as the pathway to a plethora of insights, if only we know how to interpret them. Sherlock Holmes can scan a host of seemingly superfluous details to unveil an entire personality. Just so, supposedly surface aspects of culture like holidays speak volumes about what a culture values. The emphasis on family and the return to home that serves as the central theme of the Chinese New Year contrasts sharply with the relationship with the Divine that dominates the Jewish parallel, Rosh Hashanah.  Each celebration is in its way is revelatory of the culture, and its significance is ignored at the peril of one who wants to understand the culture.

But if holidays are essential to understanding a culture, they invariably play a key role in the development of the individuals who are products of that culture. At an existential level, they provide meaning and significance to our journey through life just as certain landmarks, say, the Louvre and the Eifel Tower, provide a sense of structure and purpose to a trip to Paris. More intimately, they instill in us a set of intense feelings and emotional experiences which, because they are undergone before the age of reason, hold an especially strong grip on the personality.

And herein lies the problem. We seek a soulmate in order to share the moments of life. A glowing sunset, a funny movie, or a fine dinner become richer events when they can be experienced with someone special. The work promotion is a personal triumph but is so much more satisfying when it can be savored with someone who knows and cares about how much we have struggled. The same is true of life’s sadnesses. As the saying goes, a grief shared is half a grief, a joy shared is twice a joy. But can we really share the experience of a holiday with a partner from another culture?

I am skeptical. If Christmas were merely buying presents and singing carols, if mid-autumn festival were simply eating mooncakes, then there would be no problem in sharing the experience of the holidays, since those acts obviously can be replicated by willing partner. But a holiday is not merely the external ritual but the internal feeling it generates. And this feeling cannot simply be acquired the way you can acquire a piece of knowledge by reading about it but arrives only as a result of a lifetime of experiences.

I realized this last September as Yong and I sat in our front yard in Kenosha, a blanket spread out beneath a full moon sipping tea and consuming the closest thing we could find to mooncakes, which were round brownies from a local bakery. For me it was a nice event and a special time, but no different from the other times we had sat in the yard or in a park and picnicked. But for her, that night harkened back to memories from childhood—decades’ old memories of joyful times when the family gathered together and told stories and distant relatives many now departed were present, sweet never-to-be-repeated times which both connect her to her past and provide meaning to her present.

The night was suffused with such thoughts the way Christmas morning in Western culture is intermingled in my mind with a parallel set of experiences and emotional reactions: the opening of presents, the smell of baking cookies wafting from the kitchen, the crooning of Bing Crosby, and a sense of wholeness and harmony, of peace on earth good will towards men. And I could no more share that experience of mid-autumn festival, nor she my experience of Christmas morning, than a blind person can share a sunset with a sighted one.

This is not tragic. Tragic would have been never to have met the love of your life. This is merely an instance of the law of life which says you never gain but that you lose something—a law too obvious to require defense. In my case, having an intercultural partner is not only a refuge from a Western worldview I have grown weary of but also an ongoing invitation to a never ending process of discovery of an alternate way of seeing the world--a different set of traditions, values, and experiences. And if the price for that is an occasional disconnect on the existential impact of a few days of the year, well, it is a fee I happily submit.

But I do think holidays pose a challenge in cross cultural dating and marriage if they create unmet expectations, if you do not realize that you can no more truly experience the holiday of another culture than you can experience the inner life of the fan of a sports team by moving to the city and starting to cheer for that team.

In order to avoid these potential pitfalls, I recommend the following.

First, I would urge the Western partner to not put too much emphasis on the holidays, and especially not to expect too much of Christmas. You may have grown up with a set of rituals connected to this holiday; my advice would be to not to impose these on your intercultural partner lest either they or you become confused or disappointed by their inability to experience a holiday-like emotion during this time. This is easier to do if you are living in China, where the cultural cues are not going to be nearly as strong. But this policy of non-participation is essential if you happen to be living in the land where you are bombarded by constant reminders of how much happiness is available for you at this time of year if only you purchase the right product. Second, I would recommend you get up to speed on your partner’s holiday traditions. Even if you will not feel the emotional impact it is a gesture of good will that will not go unappreciated.