Celebrating the holidays from your students country or religion double as learning about their culture and helping prevent homesickness. While it won’t be the same, you can make any holiday special from just trying. It is also good to incorporate some of their traditions on shared holidays, such as Christmas and Easter (which are commonly celebrated here in the US and in Europe).
Ask them what holidays are important to them that they will be living with you during, either religious or national holidays. For our Norwegian student we celebrated Norway Day with putting her flag out in front of the house, I baked a traditional Norwegian cake, and we had hot dogs (a Norway Day staple) with some of her friends. Is your student a different faith than your family? What holidays would they like to celebrate? We hosted a Muslim student but she didn’t want to celebrate any holidays, she did share what they did at home though. We are very excited to celebrate Chinese New Year with our student next year (2022), something that is very foreign to us but will make her feel special that we did something.
I love adding new traditions to our familiar holidays because of our students. Some includes new food or games. We have learned several card games and new desserts to add to our Christmas festivities. We have also learned that a lot of Europe celebrates Christmas with the dinner and gifts on Christmas Eve, but we have not changed ours but do open one gift on Christmas Eve and have a nice dinner. For Easter we have usually been on Spring Break vacation, so it is a beach holiday now. We do give little baskets and share our own culture’s traditions, for example in Norway they watch murder mysteries on Easter and in Italy they get giant (like the size of your head) chocolate Easter eggs filled with goodies. Then we have a nice dinner together.
Celebrating our holidays together, shared or otherwise, helps makes us a family. So show your love for your student by making their days special.
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