Embracing American holiday traditions can be bittersweet for immigrant families. Misa Sugiura talks about her own experience.
When my parents came to America in the late ’60s, they were preparing to embrace a whole new life. Instead of a trunk full of old Japanese holiday traditions, it came with an empty calendar to fill with new American holidays.
Of course, not everyone was ready to accept my parents. The clerk was getting irritated as they struggled with English. They had trouble finding landlords willing to accept Asian tenants. When they moved to the suburbs, they couldn’t join the local tennis club. My siblings and I struggled. We were teased about our eyes and our lunch. We heard the rhyme of “Ching Chong Chinaman” almost every day.
Despite all this, or perhaps because of it, my parents were obsessed with Norman Rockwell’s version of Christmas. For every Christmas I can remember, my mother would dutifully make fruitcakes and deliver them to the neighbors, or bake us gingerbread houses from a recipe in a Time-Life cookbook. Did. The tree was also decorated and lit up. Woolworth’s red felt stockings hung carefully by the chimney, and a brightly painted wooden nutcracker glared at us from the buffet table as we ate roast beef and mashed potatoes. My father reported seeing Santa Claus on his way home from the midnight service.
I now realize that my parents built this experience for me and my siblings from scratch. Every part of the story was painstakingly assembled from picture books, Sears catalogs, and television. It must have felt foreign and unfamiliar to them, and my neighbors probably thought it was very boring. But to me, it felt authentic. It was truly ours. I felt a connection, however brief and illusory, to a mythical, traditional America that had often eluded me and my family.