July 5th Celebrating Holidays as an Ex-pat!

Living in foreign countries is interesting when it comes to celebrating or not celebrating holidays. Some holidays are universal and if celebrated on the same day like Christmas you get all of the same hype around the season like you do in your home country. Other holidays though are unique to your own country and nobody else but yourself knows that it's there. You have two choices then, you can celebrate the holiday anyway or you can ignore it. We have usually chosen to celebrate them ... any excuse for a fiesta! When we had children at home it became a time to have some fun and eat some food. I remember one Christmas in Panama we made hot chocolate one evening, turned the air conditioner on full blast in our bedroom , we all put on warm pj's (that we NEVER wore in Panama )and pretended it was snowy and cold out and drank our cocoa in our air conditioned bedroom!   Christmas in Panama looked like this...shorts and barefeet!

 

Panama was interesting as it celebrated Mother's Day in December. Manuel Noriega had changed the date to coincide with his mother's birthday and the change stayed even after he was gone!  Of course since I'm American and celebrate MY holidays as well as the countries I'm in, I got TWO Mother's Day while we were in Panama! Buya!

My favorite Holiday though is Thanksgiving. I remember before NAFTA, living in Mexico and trying to find a turkey. There were some of the scariest scrawniest looking turkeys at the Mercado(meant for boiling and making Mole, not roasting) and there were a couple of years I gave up and we had chicken or roast beef instead of turkey.  Eventually, however,  the turkeys started arriving and Thanksgiving was on full swing! We'd invite fellow Pastors and folks from church and introduce them to the Thanksgiving holiday. I have no oven here in Japan so I'm not sure yet how we'll figure out to do a turkey here this year.

All that to say, that yesterday was the 4th of July so in celebration I walked to Village Vanguard and bought us hamburgers and fries since we have no grill to bbq on.

 

Afterwards, we had homemade Peanut Buster parfaits!

 

We didn't have fireworks but I promised Gary I'd walk up behind him at some point and yell "BOOM!!!" so he could at least have the fireworks sound effects...

 

Hope all you Americans had a wonderful 4th of July!