AMERICAN CHRISTMAS

I have been in the United States for 5 months now and had quite the amount of experiences, but nothing has topped Christmas time and winter break as a whole. I am a big fan of Christmas and winter in general and knew for a fact that here in the U.S. they really go crazy for it, and just as I expected it was a very exciting Christmas full of emotions, both good and bad. Between presents, decorations, feelings and family you could feel the arrival of Christmas way more and way before than in Italy. Everywhere in town, in every household people were decorating their houses with colorful lights or with some inflatable Santas and other little stuff that all together gave the perfect vibe for Christmas. They went from an enormous amount of decorations that even synced to music if you were on the right radio station with flashing lights, to a couple lights and decorations, but no matter

what, everyone had something outside their house. Since no house was left undecorated it gave people a nice opportunity to go around with the car and look at all the different kinds of decorations. On Christmas Eve my host family prepared a very nice dinner with a cheese fondue(it was amazing) which is a typical dish in my host family, and right after that we opened our presents because our next day was going to be very full of activities and will have even more presents to unwrap. I received lots of presents between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and what I noticed being different is that they tend to be fairly simple people. Even the small gifts are cheered and well thought of for every person, which completes the warm atmosphere that Christmas is supposed to give.

On Christmas Day we reunited first with our neighbors who also have an exchange student from Germany and we had a very big breakfast together with a “white-elephant-gift” exchange, which is a little game where you have to give a random object from your own house that you may not use anymore, it can be really anything from a toy to a junk-drawer type of stuff. After that we rode to grandma’s house where the entire family of about 20 people reunited to have a big lunch, with some questionable food but still pretty heartwarming to just be there and exchange more gifts and have nice talks with people that I am not even related to. We stayed there for pretty much the entire day and then started preparing for the actual winter break.

The days that followed Christmas were supposed to be amazing, we had planned to go up north in a town called Boyne for skiing since we hadn’t gotten any snow but the day right before leaving an accident struck. I had a wrestling tournament in Livonia, Detroit; it was a full day tournament from 9am till 5pm with 5 full matches and on my fourth one I injured my shoulder and had to put on a sling for a couple days. This meant that I couldn’t ski nor have any fun for the next few weeks, which is exactly what happened(I am now fine and back to wrestling).

All in all, apart from the injury, Christmas and winter break are for now the biggest highlight of my stay here in the United States and are already something that I know I will miss a lot..