We just celebrated our daughter’s first birthday in our family… and now we are headed into our first Christmas, first Chinese New Year, and first all-around hectic holiday season with our wide-eyed and curious 2 year old. It’s been 8 months since she joined our family. Which means 8 months worth of firsts… first time down a slide, first ice cream cone, first time walking barefoot on grass, and first time sitting in a chilly mountain lake. And it is as sweet and wonderful as you might imagine, watching her explore the world and experience all it has to offer.
But as I think about the upcoming holiday season, and I think of all of the family traditions Alea will experience for the first time, I am intentionally looking for ways to tie our family’s newly formed Chinese heritage into this season of celebration and to build new traditions that reflect the new cultural makeup of our home. To be honest, when our family grew by one last spring in Henan, I think we all became a little more Chinese. I don’t just see it as my daughter’s Chinese heritage. When she joined our family, we became a multi-racial and multi-cultural family, and though I’m pretty new into this journey and still have a lot to learn, my instinct tells me that one way to help our daughter feel most whole is to treat her Chinese-ness as a natural part of our whole family, rather than a cultural connection only she needs to maintain.
To that end, I enrolled our 3-year-old (non-Chinese) daughter in Chinese lessons this past summer and began working on improving my own language skills, too. She hasn’t learned a whole lot yet, but she walks around the house incessantly singing “Happy Birthday” in Chinese. We don’t live in an area with a large Chinese population, but I do spend a lot of time with Burmese refugees, like my friend Tum pictured here with Alea… mostly because they are my friends, but also because it enables my girls to be raised with a strong Asian presence in their lives. I appreciated Mike’s post on NHBO last week when he talked about his assumption that his kids’ culture would shift easily enough.
“I mistakenly assumed cultural identity would shift when their last name and citizenship did. I thought I was being egalitarian in my assumption that their needs would be no different than those of my bio kids. From a cultural identity perspective, I mistakenly assumed that their membership in our family was “enough.” I was wrong.”
I understand – and even sometimes still struggle – with the same feeling. Especially since our kids are coming into American culture, which seems like such a hodge-podge of other cultures anyway. But I do think that the older children I know who appear to have the healthiest sense of “self” and identity seem to be those who were raised in a family who didn’t try to gloss over their differences. They came from families who recognized that they became a little more Chinese when the adoption decree was issued.
Clearly I am not and never will be Chinese. But I can be intentional about knitting in nods to Chinese culture into our family and our home and our traditions. My girls are both so young right now – 3 and 2 – that the traditions I start now will always be part of their memory and experience. By doing this, I pray that they won’t think of these things as traditions “we do because of Alea,” which may end up isolating and alienating her. But rather I hope they will just be traditions “we do because it’s how we do things in this family.” So I will make dumplings – or buy them frozen in a bag at Costco or Trader Joes – for Chinese New Year. (It’s February 19, 2015! Mark it on your calendars, people!) We’ll eat long noodles on birthdays to wish for long, healthy lives, and I’ll work the colors red and gold into as many celebrations as possible. And throughout the cold winter weeks leading up to Chinese New Year, I’m going to have a big bowl of mandarin oranges on my dining room table and red paper cutouts on my windows.
Christmas is a little trickier, to me. It isn’t really an important holiday in China… it’s celebrated only by Christians (privately, with church services and fellowship with friends) and shopping malls (with lots of garish Santa Clauses and Christmas music on repeat.) But Christmas is a big deal to our family, and I’ve been trying to come up with ways I can naturally and authentically incorporate a connection to China into our normal traditions. I found a small Chinese nativity set a few years ago… the figurines have Asian-style eyes and traditional Chinese hats. It was hand-carved in China. (Side note: I’m not sure where to find them now. Does anyone know?) But I knew I couldn’t pass it up, and I hope it becomes an important symbol to my daughter as she grows up. We also use lots and lots of Scarlet Threads’ Christmas ornaments on our tree. They are pretty and delicate and intricately-twisted Chinese character ornaments with Christmas-y meanings like faith, hope, love, gift, and joy. And not only do they help bring a bit of China to your tree, they also enable a precious Chinese family to earn a living.
But to be honest, that’s as much as I’ve been able to come up with so far. What do you do? I’d love to hear of other traditions, ideas, or items you’ve found to help you incorporate Chinese culture into your family, whether it’s at Christmas or for another celebration. And if you haven’t thought about how you can embrace your family’s Chinese heritage, it’s never too late to start.
As some added fun for this post, I’d like to host a little pre-Christmas giveaway of a complete collection of Scarlet Thread’s Chinese character Christmas ornaments. They are available for purchase on our website right now, and each year we sell out, so don’t miss your chance to get them now!
To enter the giveaway, all you need to do is comment on this post with your favorite idea for incorporating Chinese culture into your family’s traditions. Or if you don’t have any ideas about that quite yet, maybe tell us why you think this may be important for your family in the future! We will pick a winner at random on Friday and announce that winner here on the blog on December 8th, 2014.
And would you also consider sharing this post with your friends so that others can have a chance to hear about these ornaments, enter the giveaway, and perhaps get some for themselves? The ornaments are handmade by an incredible man named Lao Yan and his family, and each year we are able to buy more from him only because we sell out of the ones he made the previous year! So my goal each year is to sell out so that we can place another big order next year. (And only people like you can help me reach that goal!)
Scarlet Threads is the little social enterprise my husband and I started while we were living in China. We work with artisans – like Lao Yan – in rural China and help them sell their handicrafts to people who otherwise wouldn’t have access to their amazing creations, and in so doing, we also pay them a fair price for their work, enabling them to support their families and meet their own needs. Through the profits of the business, we support various orphan care projects and organizations in China, like New Day Foster Home. And we also help adopting families fundraise by offering our apron kits at half-off for them to resale. (Which means it is a fundraiser with a 50% profit margin! Not many of those out there!) To learn more about Scarlet Threads, please visit our website, like our Facebook page, or check out our blog.
We read a lot of books and connect with other adoptive families. My kids are still young so we are starting and increasing their and our knowledge of chinese culture.
Keep smilin!
We are hoping to take our family to a local Chinese church some time in the next few months.
We have these beautiful chinese ornaments for our tree too! Love them! We also bought other ornaments while we were in China and use them to decorate. I can’t wait to hear other ideas too!!
We are hoping to adopt from China in a few years. I love learning about all the ideas of incorporating traditions and culture. I would love to win these ornaments and put them on our tree sort of as a promise until we have our little ones home. Blessings to you all and Merry Christmas!
We are just now starting to incorporate more Chinese into our holidays. We celebrated CNY last year but didn’t incorporate as much into other holidays. This year we are having noodles & dumplings with our Christmas Day Feast that we do with our large family!
My daughter is from Chongqing China where Cloisonné is produced. I purchase Cloisonné Christmas ornaments from China Sprout for teacher gifts. I going to use the Scarlet Threads Chinese character ornaments on the packaging! Love it!!
We like to go to the big Chinese New celebration in Los Angeles’s Chinatown. I also try to check out a book about China every 3 weeks when we are at the library to get the conversation started. 😉 no clue about Christmas!! Loved the post 😉
I love this post. We are hoping to bring our son home right around Christmas so I don’t have a lot of ideas yet, but these posts help! I would love to have ornaments to remind us of his homeland!
We decorate the tree with ornaments purchased while we were in China. We also set bowls of oranges in every room, which represents fortune and wealth!!! On Christmas Eve and Chinese New Year we light lanterns and watch them float (my favorite)!! Our whole family loves incorporating Chinese traditions to our Christmas.
We are trying to bring more of Yaya’s (our 4 yo, adopted at 2 yo) culture into our family. My favorite thing we did this year was the Autumn Moon Festival Celebration. It is supposed to be second in popularity to the CNY celebrations. It is in autumn because the moon is the fullest and roundest then. It was Sept. 8th this year. It is a time where you reflect on family and ancestors and celebrate family. It is a great way for us to talk about and honor our daughters birth parents and family that we will never know. It is celebrated with moon cakes (we ate Krispy Kreme donuts as I don’t have moon cake molds, but hope to purchase them for next year.) You have a picnic outside on a blanket and have a table to “honor the moon”. (As Christians we thanked God for his gift of the moon and its beauty). You drink tea, eat oranges, and other sweets. We made some paper rabbit lanterns that we lit up with glow sticks inside and we ran around the yard with them. There is a popular Chinese legend we read, a story about the rabbit in the moon. It was so much fun to watch the huge orange moon rise over our yard and laugh and giggle and talk about how thankful we were for all of our families. I was interested in your ornaments because this year our daughter realized that her two older siblings (our bios) had so many more ornaments that she did. Noah is 10 and the first born…you can imagine how many he has. Eden is about to be 5 and also got many ornaments during my pregnancy with her and after her birth. Yaya has so few. I ordered 5 for her this year that I hope will have meaning for her. they all relate to her before she was with us and also when she first came to us. 3 of them are “Chinese” in theme. Plus you said one of the symbols is “hope”. That happens to be Yaya’s American name, and while the character for the intangible hope is different from the character if it is a name, I like the idea of a hope ornament all the same! Please keep sharing what you are doing to incorporate culture. We are also trying to find Chinese decor for our home and are finding it difficult. Blessings!
My sister lived in China for many years and was telling me how they celebrate Winter Solstice (Sunday, 21 Dec. this year) by gathering together and making homemade dumplings. We just brought our son home this year, and God was good to move us near family and friends, so we are going to gather and make dumplings and celebrate Adevent together! Then we will have them to eat during Christmas week! Yum! Once we learn how to make them ourselves we can include other friends and family every year.
We celebrated our first CNY home with some of our dearest friends, friends we met in China! We both adopted sons from Guangdong with the same agency, at the same time. We live 4 1/2 hours apart but have made it a point to gather a few times a year. CNY together will be one of our traditions.
My girls get a China themed ornament each year. Last year, I found Chinese flags at Bronners. This year, one got Year of the Tiger, and the other got Two Countries, One Heart. Others include panda ornaments I bought in China, and my “waiting” ornaments from during our adoption processes. I also have a Chinese nativity set, purchased here: http://www.ziebartfamily.com/announcement-the-angel-has-arrived/
I really think our family has become more Chinese since our adoptions. In fact, one of my bio daughters is dating a Chinese exchange student! (yikes!)
I want to adopt in the future, and my boyfriend and I plan on moving to Seattle before we do. The China Town there is huge, and we loved the idea of being near a large group of people who will look like our little one, and can show us different traditions and “normal” things for Chinese families.
We celebrate The Autumn Moon Festival and Chinese New Year at our house. We decorate, read books, eat/make authentic food, give red envelopes at CNY, and get together with Asian friends and other adoptive families for big parties. We also try to incorporate our sons’ culture idaily in many other small ways including decorations in our homes etc. It is a big and important part of our family dynamics and family culture! I’m looking for an Asian nativity and would absolutely love these Christmas ornaments! They are beautiful!
My family is also mixed. My husband is Chinese. My children learn all about Christmas from me and Chinese New Year from my husband and his family. We are so very blessed to be able to teach our children about important traditions from many cultures to help them become global citizens of the world!!
I bought some ornaments in China but I’m definitely going to get some of these too! I’ve learned to cook a few yummy authentic Chinese meals and am trying to find a Mandarin teacher for my kids. We’ve been home 8 months and I am still looking for ways to integrate Chinese culture into our family. Thanks for this post!
So far we have pictures hanging up in our home that we bought while in China. We read books. We are trying to enlarge our circle of friends and acquaintances to include people from Asia and other adoptive families. As she grows, I hope she will lead us in the things she wants to do (language classes, etc). I feel our efforts are done in good faith but perhaps might not be enough. Most of all, we are praying that she finds her identity in CHRIST.
We continue to try and add Chinese decorations and traditions to all our holiday celebrations! Food is a fun one too!
Our son just came home this past spring. For our first Christmas together, one of his gifts is a traditional Chinese outfit. I plan to have him wear it to church on Christmas Day, to blend a very special part of his heritage with a day that is very special to our family.
Our daughters, now age 4 and 5, were adopted 1.5yrs ago from China. Last year we put up a ‘kids tree’ – a small tree near their bedroom that they could decorate themselves. On Christmas eve they each found a present under that tree of a special Chinese food treat they had enjoyed in China (purchased at our local Asian market). On our regular tree we have some Chinese ornaments we purchased on the island in China – and we just ordered a batch of new ornaments from Scarlet Threads!
I hope to adopt from China in a few years, and I love the idea of adding Chinese decorations to the Christmas celebration. Many of the children in my neighborhood speak Mandarin Chinese thanks to the local elementary school’s Chinese immersion program. If I am still living here when I adopt, I hope my child(ren) will have the opportunity to participate in that program.
We’re traveling in January to bring home our daughter, but we’re already trying to “dip our toe” into Chinese culture. My bio son and I made dumplings from scratch (and they turned out OK!) during one of the long paperwork waits–it helped us feel close to our girl in spirit. And we’re trying (albeit not very successfully right now) to learn a little Mandarin.
We just started the adoption process (finalizing home study) and have been discussing this very topic! As a homeschool mom, I have now chosen Chinese as the language we will start for our elementary second language curriculum for our two boys (bio) . We also plan to study more about Chinese holidays and celebrations this year so we are better prepared when this adoption happens. ITs a wonderfully terrifying journey, emotional and beautiful and heartbreaking all at the same time. These ornaments are beautiful, I will be visiting this website. Thanks for sharing!
This is such a beautiful post and set of ideas in this comment thread. My best advice is always: “Start with what you love.” I’m most passionate about Chinese food, so I take my son to Chinatown to buy breakfast every weekend. It opens a pathway for him to learn bits of language, observe traditions and talk about what he sees in the neighborhood. Other parents might start with a love for reading, a passion for languages or a favorite hobby. The key, I think, is for kids to see their cultural heritage as a natural and really enjoyable part of family life that their parents model in a positive fashion.