When we adopted our daughter, one thing mattered to us from the start: adapting Chinese holidays for our multicultural family, to keep parts of our daughter’s cultural heritage present.
Why We Adapt
As Christians, we’re intentional about how we approach cultural holidays. Many Chinese holidays include spiritual elements tied to gods or goddesses, which don’t align with our faith. So instead of opting out entirely, we’ve chosen to focus on the cultural pieces of family, symbolism, and celebration.
A Quick Context
Chinese New Year (also called Lunar New Year) marks the beginning of the lunar calendar and is traditionally focused on family and renewal. It’s tied to the zodiac, spans multiple days, and emphasizes cleaning out the old and gathering together, often with red decorations, shared meals, and symbolic traditions meant to represent good fortune and longevity.
The other holiday we celebrate is the Mid-Autumn Festival, which falls in fall (obviously…) and centers on reunion, the full moon, and harvest. It’s quieter, more reflective, and traditionally includes mooncakes shared with family.
What It Looks Like in Our House
Our Chinese New Year celebration is best described as well-intentioned and definitely multicultural.
We decorate. We build that year’s Chinese New Year LEGO set. We invite family over for a very inauthentic meal from our local Chinese buffet. In past years, our daughter has handed out red envelopes and even talked to her class about Chinese New Year, explaining what it is and why our family celebrates it.
Is it everything they do in China or other Asian countries? Nope. I care about celebrating it, not celebrating it perfectly.
Our burnt mooncakes vs. our bought mooncakes.
The Mid-Autumn Festival (a Cautionary Tale)
We’ve also tried making mooncakes to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival.
The mooncakes were a disaster. But again, the point wasn’t perfection. It was showing our daughter that her culture is worth acknowledging, even imperfectly, and doing it together as a family, which is part of what the holiday is about anyway.
The Takeaway
If you’re part of a multicultural family, here’s what I’ll say: you don’t have to be an expert to be intentional. You can honor culture while adapting it. You can try, fail, and try again.
Sometimes that looks like red decorations, LEGO sets, and mooncakes that should never be served to guests. And that’s perfectly okay.
(PS – If you’re looking for some other holiday advice, here’s another blog post from another Indianapolis Mom!)
