Celebrating Christmas Around The World

Christmas is often seen as a “family holiday”, but these days more and more people choose to spend Christmas abroad.

Some want to get away from the boring weather, others from their extended family members – and a few simply because they want to see what Christmas is like in other places.

We’ve celebrated Christmas in countries all over the world over the past few years, and they have all been very different.

This year we will be celebrating in Berlin, Germany, and we’re really looking forward to visit the Christmas markets there and sample some of the German Christmas food.

Here are a few places where we’ve celebrated Christmas holidays:

Switzerland

Christmas is a beautiful time to visit Switzerland – Snow caped mountains, traditional cottages with paintings on the walls and Christmas lights in every window – the small villages up in the Swiss Alps really turn into a winter wonderland.

In the Swiss alp villages the traditions are very strong and important, so during the Christmas month you will see some nice celebrations, like the week before Christmas when children dress up and visit homes bringing small gifts.

Bell-ringing is another very popular tradition, and there is always a bell-ringing competition between the villages of calling people to midnight-mass.

Christmas dinner is also very traditional, when you typically eat the infamous ”Cheese fondue”, where you dip bread into melted cheese.

Tradition has it that if you drop the bread into the cheese you have to do a dare – or clean the pot after dinner, which is not an easy task..!

New Zealand

Christmas in New Zealand and Australia is – for a European, a very strange experience…

They have the same traditions as in the UK, where they decorate Christmas trees, hang up Christmas lights on the streets, fill the houses and shops with Santa figures, red socks and mistles – but you know something isn’t quite as ”it should” when the only snowmen you see outside are inflatable.

The most common way to celebrate Christmas in New Zealand is to have Christmas dinner outside together with friends and family at the beach and then go surfing or for a lovely swim.

Christmas at the beach and during the summer is very weird for someone from Sweden, who is used to spending December inside trying to avoid the cold, grey snowy weather outside.

Thailand

Celebrating Christmas in Thailand won’t be a very traditional experience, but that can be quite nice for a change sometimes.

Holidays in Thailand during the Christmas period is becoming more popular, and we were seriously considering taking one of the many 2 weeks holidays to Phuket over Christmas this year because we found a crazy cheap flight.

But we celebrated Christmas in Thailand last year, and did everything we otherwise normally wouldn’t do on Christmas, which was really fun.

It was nice to get away from the traditions – do what you want and eat what you want, because let’s face it – half of the things on the traditional Christmas table are things we never eat at any other time of the year because they simply don’t taste that good.

So having our favorite curry, banana pancakes and hanging out in a bar in the evening was such a relief!

Where is your favorite place to celebrate Christmas?

(photo credit: 1 - 2)