Going Home for the Holidays as an Expat: The Honest Reality

Everyone assumes you are happy to be home. The reality is more complicated than that.

There is a version of coming home for the Holidays that exists in films and adverts — the warm arrival, the familiar smells, the uncomplicated joy of being back where you belong. And then there is the version that most long-term expats and TCKs actually experience. The one where home feels both familiar and foreign. Where you love the people and find the context constraining. Where the holiday is precious and exhausting in equal measure. Where you count the days until you see family and also, quietly, count the days until you go back.

The Gap Between Expectation and Experience

The emotional reality of coming home for the holidays as an expat rarely matches the cultural script. The expectation — yours and everyone else's — is that being back will feel like relief. Like finally. And it does, sometimes, in flashes. The smell of the kitchen. The particular sound of a parent's voice in person rather than through a phone. The physical presence of people you love and rarely see. But alongside the relief runs something else: the awareness of how much you have changed, how different your daily life is, how much has been built in the distance.

Reverse Culture Shock in Miniature

Coming home for a short holiday compresses the reverse culture shock process into days rather than months. You arrive, feel the disorientation, begin to settle, and then leave before you have fully readjusted. The constrained nature of a holiday visit — the family expectations, the social obligations, the unchanged rooms and changed dynamics — can surface the gap between who you were when you left and who you are now more acutely than a longer return would.

The Question Everyone Asks

When are you coming back? It is the holiday question for expats. Asked with love. Received with complicated feelings. Because the honest answer — I am not sure, and I am also not sure what coming back would mean for who I am now — is too complex to give over Christmas dinner. So, you say something vague and true: soon, maybe, we will see. And you carry the complexity of it quietly, the way you have learned to carry most of the complexity of living between worlds.

Making the Holiday Yours

The expats and TCKs who navigate the holidays most peacefully are the ones who have stopped trying to fit themselves into the version of the holiday that exists in other people's expectations and have built their own version of it. The new tradition that started in the city they live in now. The friends-as-family gathering that has become as meaningful as the biological one. The hybrid holiday that holds both worlds. Home is not a single place. The holiday is not a single story. Both of them are yours to build.

Wherever home is this year — follow @drftid for a community that gets you and visit drftid.com for pieces that celebrate your identity. 🖤

Everywhere. Nowhere. Yours.