Celebrating the Holidays When You’re Away From Family

Celebrating holidays in a cross-cultural, multicultural context.

The holidays are often imagined as a time of warmth, closeness, and togetherness. Family meals, familiar traditions, shared memories. But when you’re living abroad, the holidays can feel very different, quieter, heavier, or emotionally confusing in ways you didn’t expect.

If you’re celebrating the holidays away from your family, you’re not doing it “wrong.” You’re navigating a very real psychological experience that deserves space and compassion.

Why the holidays hit harder abroad and away from family

Holidays act as emotional amplifiers. They highlight what matters most to us, connection, belonging, identity and when those things feel disrupted, the contrast becomes sharper.

When you live far from home, holidays can trigger:

• Grief for what you’re missing

• Guilt for not being “there”

• Loneliness, even if you’re surrounded by new friends

• A sense of being out of sync with everyone else

• The pressure to “make it special” and still "count" based on ideas from long-held traditions

Following on from the final point, there’s often an unspoken expectation to compensate:

“If I can’t be with my family, I should make the holidays amazing.” While it can be a beautiful experience to incorporate and continue home traditions when abroad, if taken to an extreme, this pressure can backfire. Trying to recreate home exactly as it was, the same food, the same rituals, the same feeling, can intensify the sense of loss when it inevitably falls short. If you've experienced this in the past, instead of asking, “How do I make this feel like home?” it can be more helpful to ask, “What do I need this year?”

You don’t have to choose between cultures. Emotional adaptation doesn’t work that way. You’re allowed to hold both.

For example, you might:

• Keep one tradition that matters deeply to you

• Try one local celebration with curiosity, not obligation

• Let this year be quieter than others

Holidays abroad aren’t about replacing your family or your culture. They’re about integration, not erasure. And while there’s no universal formula, but these principles often help:

• Name what you’re feeling. Even silently. Especially to yourself.

• Allow the mixed emotions. Joy and grief can coexist. They often do.

• Lower the bar. This doesn’t have to be your best holiday ever.

• Create small rituals. A walk, a candle, a familiar song, a call at an odd hour.

• Reach out intentionally (even if your instinct is to self-isolate during difficult times). Reach out not to perform cheerfulness, but to stay connected.

When support helps

For some people, the holidays bring up deeper layers: unresolved family dynamics, identity questions, or accumulated grief from years of living abroad. Therapy can offer a space where these experiences are explored without judgment.

At Hola Therapy, we work with many expats, immigrants and international families navigating exactly this: belonging, distance, and emotional transition. You don’t have to make sense of it alone.