Thanksgiving as an Expat in Romania

Thanksgiving used to be one of the most intentional days of my year. Not because of patriotism or tradition—actually the opposite. For a decade, I opened my home to anyone who wanted a place to land. My table wasn’t about turkey or spectacle; it was an annual practice in truth-telling and community. I cooked Indigenous foods, played PBS’s We Shall Remain, and held space for conversation about the real history of the holiday. It was part education, part ritual, and part quiet resistance. And it mattered to me, deeply.

Living in Romania has stripped all of that away.

This year, I didn’t host. I didn’t guide. I didn’t shape the meaning of the day. We were invited to cook a traditional American meal for Romanians, which was fun seeing others taste traditional holiday foods. Then we were invited to join another American for a joint Thanksgiving. The holiday felt like a performance of “American culture,” disconnected from my usual ritual of honesty and reflection that was my tradition I built over the years.

And I felt strange. Not because of the people—never them. I always enjoy the friendship. But the emptiness of the performance was a strange outfit to wear. The meaning quietly slipped away beneath the surface. How easily a holiday rooted in colonization and betrayal can become a cheerful brand.

The painful truth is that I miss the version of Thanksgiving was once mine. My home is temporarily gone—I no longer have a place to host, teach, or gather people in the way that once felt so much a part of my rhythm. I miss the firelit evenings, the communal cooking, the people who wandered in and out of my kitchen. I miss the chance to root the day in honesty rather than nostalgia. And the hardest part is knowing that even back home, many people never understood why that mattered. I was always the “weird one,” the one bringing nuance to a holiday people preferred to keep simple.

Being an expat forces you to witness your own traditions from the outside. And sometimes that means watching them lose their shape. Thanksgiving, for me, is no longer a ritual of community education and cultural reckoning. It’s something else now. Something smaller. Something I haven’t fully figured out how to carry into this new life.

Maybe, someday, I’ll build a version of the holiday here that feels like mine again. Maybe I’ll find a way to root it in truth and gratitude, not performance. But this year, I’m simply sitting with the grief of what’s been lost—and acknowledging that moving countries means leaving behind not just places, but the rituals that once made us feel at home.