Merry (Finnish) Christmas! Working Abroad for the Holidays
How to make the holidays work for you.
Photo by Lonely Girl, Lonely World.
The year-end holiday season is a big time for a lot of people, whatever you celebrate. In Europe, the cities go all out for Christmas. Most people don’t want to be working during a time for family, food, and festivities.
If you’re a seasonal worker in tourism, however, you might just be spending December 25th far away from friends and family. My Christmas Day 2023 was spent taking a snow shower in the Finnish Arctic Circle, courtesy of one of my very mischievous tour guests.
A lot of them asked if I missed my parents (yes) and expressed aww’s over working during the holidays, so they could get a fun-filled family adventure. I was okay with it.
Christmas has never been a super big thing in my family. We put up a tree (well… more like, we light the tree that we leave up 365 days of the year). Maybe we buy some presents or cook dinner for each other. We don’t do it for any religious reason. I’d like to go bigger for Christmas, but it’s not part of my family’s practices.
For us, the big one is Chinese New Year (aka. Lunar New Year), usually in February. So, working abroad during Christmas? No big deal.
Tip: Holidays are relative. Look for jobs abroad that don’t span over your culture’s main celebrations. Even if you end up working through some holiday or festival, at least it won’t feel like you’re missing too much.
Some of my peers had a harder time. My cabin mate, for instance, hadn’t been home for Christmas in the past 6 years because of her work on cruise ships. It all depends on your contract period/length and/or financial situation.
I was lucky to avoid holiday regret, and I determined to make of my Finnish Christmas the best it could be.
I heard Finland actually celebrates Christmas on December 24th. One of the local Finnish drivers told me it’s December 25th, though online sources say otherwise. If anyone can clarify this for me, that’d be much appreciated.
Regardless, we had a wonderful, white Christmas Day. I spent the day leading my tour group on an adventure-filled search for Santa, dodging snowballs down my jacket and getting back at my tour guests for their naughty trickery.
Who’s the real children here?
The point is any holiday or celebration can be made special if you’re approaching it with an open mindset. And if you really want to spent that special time with close family and friends, then looking for jobs that keep away from your culture’s greatest celebrations can be a useful tool.
This way, you’ll probably be applying for positions in cultures unfamiliar to you, and that in itself is a unique venture to see and understand another part of the world.
[This is a really unrefined, stream-of-consciousness post. I might edit it later when I get a wider berth of time. But I’m determined to stick to my 2 articles/week schedule, and sometimes writing anything is more conducive to the creative process than writing nothing.]
Image provided by Unsplash.