17 August 2026 · Little Rei

Multicultural Holidays to Celebrate This Season

Most holiday content assumes it knows which holidays you keep. That assumption gets stranger the more mixed a family is — and a great many families now are, whether by marriage, migration, adoption or simply living somewhere with a different calendar from the one you grew up with. What follows is a year of celebrations that families around the world mark, with a note on what each actually is and how a baby or toddler can be part of it.

Two ground rules before the list. Dates for many of these follow lunar or lunisolar calendars, so they move against the Gregorian calendar each year — check the date rather than assuming last year's. And there is a difference between celebrating a holiday that is yours, being invited to one that is not, and borrowing the decorative parts of someone else's tradition without the meaning. The first two are lovely. The third is what people mean by appropriation, and the fix is usually as simple as asking someone whose holiday it is.

Which holidays are worth knowing about?

• Lunar New Year — marked across China, Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia and diaspora communities everywhere, on a date between late January and late February. Red decorations, family meals, red packets for children, and a new outfit for the baby.
• Diwali — the festival of lights, observed by Hindus, Sikhs, Jains and some Buddhists, usually October or November. Oil lamps, rangoli patterns on the floor, sweets, new clothes.
• Hanukkah — eight nights, usually December, marked by lighting one additional candle each night. Fried foods, dreidels, a very small-child-friendly nightly ritual.
• Christmas — 25 December for most churches, 7 January for many Orthodox Christians. Enormously variable by country, from midnight mass to beach barbecues in the southern hemisphere.
• Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha — the two major Islamic festivals, on the lunar Hijri calendar so they shift roughly eleven days earlier each Gregorian year. New clothes, family visiting, gifts and money for children.
• Kwanzaa — 26 December to 1 January, an African-American cultural celebration built around seven principles, one per night, each marked by lighting a candle.
• Día de los Muertos — 1 and 2 November, primarily Mexican: an altar for relatives who have died, marigolds, photographs, and their favourite food. Warm rather than sombre.
• Vesak — the Buddhist celebration of the Buddha's birth, enlightenment and death, usually April or May. Lanterns, temple visits, vegetarian food.
• Solstice — the longest and shortest days, mirrored between hemispheres: December is midwinter in the north and midsummer in the south. Celebrated in many secular and pagan traditions, and a good anchor for families who want a seasonal marker without a religious one.
• Thanksgiving — the fourth Thursday of November in the United States, the second Monday of October in Canada. A harvest and gratitude meal, not a global holiday.
• The full month and the hundredth day — in Chinese, Korean and several other East Asian traditions, a baby's first month (满月) and hundredth day are celebrated in their own right, often the first time the baby is presented to extended family.

How do you include a baby in any of this?

Modestly. A baby's experience of a holiday is sensory rather than narrative — light, music, unfamiliar smells, being handled by a lot of people — and the version that works is short, early in the day, and abandoned without guilt when it stops working.

• Pick one sensory element rather than the whole event. Lighting a candle. A particular song. One food smell from the kitchen.
• Keep it before the second nap. Almost every holiday disaster with a small child is a scheduling problem wearing a costume.
• Give them the safe fragment of the tradition: an empty red packet to hold, a wooden dreidel too big to swallow, a marigold head, an unlit lamp.
• Photograph the small moment rather than staging the big one. The staged photo is for adults and the baby knows it.
• Have an exit. Deciding in advance that you will leave after an hour makes the hour far more enjoyable.

What is actually dangerous?

Holidays concentrate the hazards a baby-proofed house has usually removed, and they do it in someone else's home. The list is short and predictable, which makes it easy to check.

• Open flame. Candles, oil lamps and sparklers are central to several of these festivals. Nothing lit within reach, nothing left burning in a room with a mobile child.
• Small objects. Coins, decorative beads, dreidels, small ornaments, nuts and boiled sweets are all choking hazards for under-threes.
• Button batteries in decorations, singing cards and toys. Swallowing one is a medical emergency, not a wait-and-see.
• Food. Whole nuts, hard sweets, grapes and cherry tomatoes uncut, and — under twelve months — honey, which carries a botulism risk.
• Noise. Firecrackers and fireworks are genuinely loud enough to damage infant hearing. Distance, or ear protection, or stay in.
• Crowds and heat. A baby passed around a warm room full of relatives overheats faster than the adults holding them.

How do you handle a family that keeps more than one tradition?

Deliberately, and earlier than feels necessary. Families who work it out in advance tend to land on one of three approaches: keep both fully, keep both in reduced form, or keep one at home and visit the other. All three work. What causes friction is leaving it undecided until the week of, at which point it becomes a negotiation conducted by exhausted people.

For a child, growing up inside more than one tradition is a straightforward advantage, provided the traditions are presented as belonging to them rather than as one real holiday and one visited holiday. Use the actual names for things. Learn a few words in the relevant language if it is not yours — grandparents notice, and so eventually does the child.

What if you do not celebrate anything in particular?

Then invent something small and repeat it. The mechanism that makes holidays matter to children is repetition, not doctrine — the same thing, at roughly the same time each year, done the same way. A specific meal, a walk somewhere fixed, one decoration that comes out annually. Within three or four years a child will insist on it, which is how every tradition on the list above started.

Questions parents ask

Keep reading

• Halloween at Home: Safe Activities for the Whole Family
• Terrific Thanksgiving Crafts for the Whole Family
• Baby Full Month vs 100 Days: Singapore Gift-Giving Guide

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