Adding a Language and Doubling the Holidays

By Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa

Thanksgiving has been my favorite holiday ever since college. I came to realize its true significance one year when I was unable to go back to California from Boston because of the expensive airfare. I found myself in a temporary dorm for the long weekend with a dozen international students from around the world, among them an Italian, two Ecuadorians, a Haitian, a Dominican, a Mexican, a Greek, and a Cypriot.

As the token American I found myself “in charge” of cooking my first turkey and explaining the meaning of Thanksgiving to everyone else. In between phone calls to my sister on the other coast for tips on roasting, I was grilled by the foreign students about the “true” meaning of the holiday. It was brilliant; I heard myself saying that it was a day of reflection to be thankful for everything one had, but mainly for the simple things like health, family and friends—something I think I had never been conscious of until I was pressed to explain. I told my new friends that it was the one holiday that all Americans celebrated, independent of their religion, making it the most special day of the year. During that particular Thanksgiving, I realized how much we take for granted and how rarely we acknowledge what is really important, something I will always be grateful for.

Ironically, despite the importance of Thanksgiving to me, I have found this holiday tradition to be the most difficult to maintain while raising my multilingual family.

Because holidays, or “holy days,” are founded on shared historical traditions, it is hard, though not impossible, to share them with people outside your culture; that is, unless the deeper concepts behind the holidays come to the forefront. Yes, I went into the Indians and the Pilgrims when talking about Thanksgiving for the first time to my international friends, but I found myself returning to the overall concept of thankfulness as opposed to the historical angle over and over again, a value which people from all backgrounds can understand.

Some years later, I recall being in Geneva and calling my Swiss, German, French, Austrian, Rwandan, Hindi, Canadian, Colombian and Peruvian friends to invite them for Thanksgiving dinner. “It’s sort of like a harvest fest…no, no, it’s not religious….well, it’s kind of like a day of reflection….no, not at all! No, you don’t have to donate anything….It’s just a chance to be with people you would like to thank for being in your life…” While making the invitations was a challenge, the actual celebration was natural. Everyone knows what it means to be thankful, everyone knows how often we forget to tell others how much they mean to us.

When I celebrated Thanksgiving last year with a small group of Ecuadorian, Argentinean, Dutch and German friends, one of the women who had accompanied me the year before actually organized the children and told them they each should share something they were thankful for; something that never would have occurred to me in my own celebrations, but which she had adapted to in light of her new understanding of the meaning of Thanksgiving. It was beautiful and many a motherly tear was shed listening to the kids say what every parent dreams (“I am thankful for my mommy and daddy, and, yeah, well, for my baby sister too”).

As a half-Japanese American married to an Ecuadorian with children in the German School I have found the same joy in adding holidays as I have found in languages: everything is welcome and offers great opportunities for personal growth. Our family view of the holidays? An example is the October-December timeframe: Oktoberfest, full of beer drinking and song, is something that comes just before Halloween, which we now see as a precedent to All Saint’s Day (November 1st), during which we drink colada morada and eat guaguas de pan, confectioned by the indigenous people of Ecuador (see recipe for these in this issue of Multilingual Living Magazine). Just prior to Christmas in Ecuador, IntiRaymi is celebrated at the winter solstice in honor of the Sun God, then we welcome El Niño Jesus on December 24th, and Santa Claus on December 25th, keeping an eye out for Schwarzer Peter all along who drops a lump of coal in the children’s stockings if they have misbehaved.

While the mélange of traditions may seem a mishmash of customs, it is actually a simple act of celebrating what is natural to all cultures: the need for rituals to mark our lives and the passing of time. At first, as with my children’s four languages, I thought there would be some natural confusion, but I realize that each holiday has its place and time and the children learn to manage each within their own space. (This is similar to what happens with the Tooth fairy, who often beats out el ratoncito to deliver money for a lost pearly white!)

Granted, it has not been easy explaining Thanksgiving to others, but my non-American friends have told me they remember those celebrations as highlights of our friendship. My political family in Ecuador, (including my brother-in-law’s British wife!), anxiously await Thanksgiving celebration at our house. Perhaps it is the organized excuse to share how you feel about those around you, or the time one takes in thinking about what is really important in life, or all the love that goes into the pumpkin pie, but Thanksgiving remains my favorite holiday.

Just as we have used language as an entrance into other cultures, we use holidays as a path back to universal values. This year is no exception. We just moved to Lima, Peru and I am out to convert another group of international friends about the special nature of Thanksgiving (wish me luck!).

TRACEY TOKUHAMA-ESPINOSA is a native of California who studied her Master’s of Education in International Development at Harvard University and her undergraduate degrees of International Relations and Mass Communication at Boston University. Since 1997 she has facilitated workshops for families, companies and professional educators on themes of language development, brain-based learning, learning styles, critical thinking and teaching methods and strategies. Her list of clients includes Proctor & Gamble (Switzerland and UK), Early Bird Early Childhood Education (The Netherlands), Shell OUTPOST Schools, Ares Serono, The Diplomatic Women’s Group of Geneva, the University of Melbourne and schools in a dozen countries (Argentina, Australia, Norway, Germany, Italy, Ecuador, Thailand, Switzerland, the UK, The Netherlands, Belgium and France). Tracey speaks and writes in English and Spanish fluently, knows conversational French, some Japanese, and basic German. She and her Ecuadorian husband are raising three multilingual children in English, Spanish, German and French. She is the author of Raising Multilingual Children: Foreign Language Acquisition and Children (2000) and The Multilingual Mind: Questions by, for and about people living with many languages (2003). www.multifaceta.com.

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