An Expat Christmas Story: What a Small Tree Taught Me About Home

There are certain things you think you can carry with you unchanged when you move abroad. Your routines. Your personality. Your favorite holiday traditions. You imagine everything fitting neatly into your new life, as if your old world and your new one will merge without friction.

And then the holidays arrive, and suddenly you realize nothing fits quite the way you imagined.

For me, this realization came in the shape of a Christmas tree.

When I first moved to France, I held onto the idea that I could recreate Christmas exactly as I knew it back in the United States. I grew up with trees that were taller than me. Trees packed with ornaments until you could barely see the branches. Trees that glowed with so many lights the living room felt like a small theme park. In my mind, Christmas needed to look like that to feel like Christmas at all.

My first December in France, I walked into a shop to buy a tree and stopped in the doorway, confused. The trees were smaller than I expected. Much smaller. And thinner. They looked like the understudies of the Christmas tree world. I remember circling the display, thinking maybe the larger ones were kept outside or had already been sold. But no; this was the selection. A forest of modest little trees, each one quiet and reserved, with more empty space between the branches than I knew what to do with.

I picked one anyway and brought it home. I stood it in the corner of my small apartment and tried to convince myself it looked festive. It barely came up to my waist. I managed to hang a few ornaments on it, but the branches weren’t used to being decorated the way I was used to. Everything drooped slightly, as if the tree was overwhelmed by the expectation of becoming something it wasn’t.

I sat on the couch and stared at it. It was my first real wave of holiday nostalgia abroad. That little tree felt like a reminder of everything I had left behind. The childhood Christmas mornings. The smell of chocolate chip cookies in the oven. The sound of my family moving about through the house. Even the way the lights glowed through the branches of a full American tree. It all came rushing back at once.

I tried again the next year, and the year after that. I kept searching for a taller tree, a fuller tree, something closer to the ones I grew up with. But most urban middle-class French apartments are not designed for big trees. And French Christmas trees are not designed for the ornament-heavy American style. Every December, I found myself adjusting my expectations and gently reminding myself that I did not, in fact, need a Disneyland-style tree to enjoy the season.

But the truth is, those early years felt strange. Not terrible…just disorienting in a way I couldn’t quite explain out loud.

There’s a kind of homesickness that appears when a familiar tradition takes on a slightly unfamiliar shape. You start to notice the gaps and the missing pieces. The small ways your new life does not fit your old rituals. You want to embrace your new country’s way of doing things, but part of you misses the version you grew up with. You feel caught between two worlds, trying to decorate a tree that somehow needs to represent both.

Over time, something shifted. It didn’t happen all at once, though. It was slow, almost unnoticeable.

I started thinking less about the tree itself and more about what I wanted the season to feel like. I realized I had spent years focusing on the appearance of Christmas, the aesthetics, the familiar markers of home. But the moments that meant the most had never been about the height of the tree or the number of ornaments hanging from it. They were about something much simpler.

They were the quiet evenings with people I cared about. The phone calls with family across the ocean. They were the messages that arrived unexpectedly, and the tiny rituals that made me feel connected to myself again.

Little by little, the pressure disappeared. I stopped trying to force my French Christmas tree to look like an American one. I stopped counting how many ornaments could fit on the branches. I stopped worrying about whether the tree felt “Christmas-y” enough. Instead, I began noticing the small joys in the things I had been too distracted to see: the way the lights reflected off the window at night. The way my apartment felt warm, even on the coldest evenings. The way simple decorations could still make the space feel inviting, and the way a small tree could still hold meaning.

Somewhere along the way, the tree stopped representing what I had lost and began representing what I had gained. My life had changed. My traditions had changed. And surprisingly, I had changed too. Christmas no longer needed to match the version I grew up with in order to feel real. It just needed to feel like mine.

That's something a lot of expats eventually learn. Not always through Christmas trees…sometimes through food, sometimes through celebrations that look different from what you grew up with. And sometimes through routines that shift slowly over the years, until one day you realize they no longer resemble the ones you had back home.

Whenever traditions change shape, there is a moment of grief. It may be a small one, but it’s real. You miss the version you knew and the simplicity of it. You miss the comfort that came from doing things the same way every year.

But at some point, you begin to understand that the heart of a tradition does not live in the decorations or the rituals themselves. It lives in the meaning you carry with you. It lives in the connections you nurture, and in the moments you create with the people around you. Even when the tree is smaller and the ornaments feel sparse, and even when your holiday looks nothing like the ones you grew up with.

Now, all these years later, I barely think about the size of my Christmas tree. Some years it is small, and others it is slightly less small. Some years it leans a little to the left no matter how many times I turn it. But it always ends up being enough, because what fills the room is not the tree…it is the life I have built around it.

If you’re spending the holidays abroad this year and your traditions feel different, or smaller, or slightly incomplete, you’re not alone. Every expat I know has had a moment where the season felt unfamiliar and strangely emotional. It takes time to build a new version of home and for new traditions to take root. And it takes time to let go of the pressure to recreate something exactly as it used to be.

But you get there, eventually.

And one day, you may find yourself standing in front of a small tree in a small apartment, feeling a sense of peace. Not because it looks like the tree from your past, but because it reflects the life you are living now.

Big or small, sparse or full, familiar or new…there is room for all of it.

Because the heart of Christmas travels with you, even when the tree does not.

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If this expat Christmas season has brought up nostalgia or stirred a few unexpected feelings, it can help to have support that meets you where you are. I work with expat women who want more clarity, steadiness, and a deeper sense of home within themselves as they navigate life overseas.

If you’d like to explore whether this kind of support could help you move into the new year with more ease, you can book a free discovery call through the Contact tab in the menu.

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