During this time of year we are often asked by our supporters what Thanksgiving and Christmas look like in Indonesia.
Let’s start with Thanksgiving. As Thanksgiving is a purely American holiday, it is not celebrated in any public way. The only way you might notice Thanksgiving is approaching here is seeing 1 or 2 frozen turkeys in the grocery store.
While it is not publicly celebrated here, we celebrate it. This year we invited some South African friends over for dinner. It was a delight to share our traditions and food with them in this place. It made a plain Thursday into something more festive for them. We cooked almost all of the traditional foods. We bought one of the few frozen turkeys in town (which I didn’t read the price right and paid WAY too much for). We had sweet potato casserole, green bean casserole, mashed potatoes, gravy and pumpkin pie. I even made a special, last minute trip to the one store in town that sells cranberry sauce, but I forgot to put it on the table for the meal. Whoops.
Serving up pumpkin pie to the kids.
Onto Christmas….
If you drive around town or do any shopping you will know Christmas is coming. There are Christmas trees in front of stores, Christmas music throughout the stores, signs with candy canes, Santa hats, or snowflakes on them and big displays in the malls. But it is still miniscule compared to the U.S. displays. There are no special Christmas light displays. It’s just a different feeling.
We have found a few wintery things in town. Two malls have installed ice skating rinks. One mall has a “snow” playground. I’m pretty sure it’s a whole lot of shaved ice for kids to play in.
The ice skating rink at one of the malls.
We will celebrate with friends by having a Christmas cookie exchange and on Christmas Eve we have invited some friends over for the kids to decorate gingerbread cookies. Christmas day we will attend church and have a meal with the other LCMS family working with us in town.
What are your Christmas traditions?