Celebrating Christmas in Taiwan, 2022

Coming December, Louis Vuitton and Coco Channel were trying hard to one-up each other with shiny Christmas displays and fir trees blended with New Year wishes and (Lunar New Year) bunnies. Meanwhile, we sat together with a warm coffee and strategized how to create some festive atmosphere in our private life. Here is what we came up with!

Step one: Get the right food. With some luck we hunted down an authentic Christmas stollen. Gluehwein too was hard to find – until we stumbled upon bottles and bottles of it at IKEA (of all places). (After seeing the cheap 80c speculoos from Aldi to go for 9€ in the expat delis, we brought some from Germany this year. There has to be some advantage in markets starting to sell Christmas food in September!) Finally: Christmas cookies! As if the packages from home weren’t enough, we decided to organize a cookie-baking-party with friends. 😋

Step two: Christmas eve. We are seven hours ahead and roughly 10,000 km away from our families, so it is really easy to make this day about how lonely you are. Lucky enough, we are also just a few hundred meters away from dear friends who were more than happy to have a lovely duck-dinner with us. Crisis averted.

Last but not least: A few holidays to relax, reflect, and wind down. I got Anna a hilarious jigsaw puzzle on the scooters of Taiwan (kudos to Tom Parker, you can find him on Instagram), which was a great past-time. (We had fun picking “the two scooters that represent 2023” a few days later when celebrating NYE.)