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I arrived in the United States in 1996 and settled in Palm Beach County, Florida, only a few months before the holidays. I was grateful to be here. I understood the opportunity. Still, nothing prepared me for how quiet that first holiday season would feel.
Back home in Haiti, the holidays were never confined to a single day. Christmas Eve unfolded late into the night with something we call Reveyon. People gathered very late. Food was prepared carefully and generously. Friends arrived. Family arrived. Often, more people than expected. Laughter carried from house to house. Music drifted through open windows. No one worried about work the next day. Life slowed down so people could be together.
That rhythm did not exist for me yet in America.
That year, the holidays arrived quietly. Streets emptied. Stores closed early. The world felt still. I barely saw my brother, Mercidieu, who worked double shifts. There was no long table waiting at home. No familiar voices filling the space. Just silence and distance.
For many immigrants, the first holiday season is not really a celebration. It is a reminder of friends left behind, of relatives far away, of traditions that live vividly in memory but are not yet part of daily life. You are present physically, but emotionally, you are still somewhere else.
In Haiti, we hosted often. Celebration was something you protected. Work adjusted around it whenever possible. Of course, some people still worked. Doctors and caregivers always did. Patients still needed care. But even then, work existed alongside the moment. It did not erase it.
In the years that followed, I also spent some holidays in the Dominican Republic, where I went to medical school. Those seasons carried a different kind of familiarity. I was no longer fully at home, but I was not entirely alone either. The language was shared. The food felt close. The music carried echoes of Haiti, even when the traditions were not exactly the same. Those holidays taught me something important. Belonging does not return all at once, and it does not always return in its original form. Sometimes it comes through proximity, through cultural resonance, through being understood well enough to rest. Even then, it was a partial belonging, comforting but incomplete, another step in learning how to live between places.
Over time, things changed. As I became more rooted here, the holidays softened. New rhythms formed slowly. My brother Jean began hosting Christmas Eve gatherings, recreating pieces of what we once had. My mother held firmly to January first and hosted dinner every year without exception.
January first has always mattered deeply to Haitians. It is our Independence Day. It is marked by Soup Joumou, a dish once reserved for enslavers and later reclaimed as a symbol of freedom. Haitians were forbidden to eat it during slavery. After independence, we made it our own. Every Haitian eats it on January first, throughout the day, without exception. It is history made edible. Memory served warm.
In Florida, after my mother passed away, my brothers and sisters began hosting holiday dinners in rotation so the tradition would not disappear. In New York, my aunts Maxilia, Eronne, and Marie Lourdes continued the same practice. Every year, they call me early in the morning and tell me to come pick up my Soup Joumou.
Today, even that tradition feels fragile. Haiti is no longer the same. Gangs have taken over entire neighborhoods. My hometown is now largely deserted as people fled for safety. The places where we once gathered no longer exist as they did.
Still, my brother Jean leads a tradition among the 10 of us siblings. Each year, we collect money together and send it to loved ones and friends back home so they can still celebrate. Even from a distance, we try to keep something alive. It is our way of helping others hold onto celebration when circumstances make it difficult.
At home, we also cook and gather for dinner on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, not because it is exactly how it was, but because tradition matters. My children represent the next generation. They need to know where they come from, and they need permission to grow where they are planted. Embracing American traditions is not a betrayal of our past. It is part of how belonging becomes possible and how daily life becomes easier. Integration, not replacement, is what allows identity to take root. They need to taste memories while learning new rituals, to honor both where we come from and where we are, and to see that belonging can stretch across borders without breaking.
That first holiday season in America taught me something quietly. Belonging takes time. Celebration does not cross borders automatically. You learn how to celebrate again slowly, while carrying the meaning of what once was.
Years later, I became a psychiatrist. I sit daily with people who have crossed borders carrying loss alongside hope. Many tell me the same thing in different words. One patient once said to me, “I am safe here, but my life is still somewhere else.” That sentence has stayed with me. Displacement is not only geographic. It is emotional. Cultural. Temporal.
Helping newcomers integrate has taught me that belonging is not automatic. Celebration does not cross borders intact. It has to be rebuilt slowly, with memory as its foundation.
I can enjoy the holidays now. I gather more easily. The season feels warmer. Still, I will never forget that first one, the silence, the distance.
It stays with me, not as sadness, but as the beginning of learning how to belong in more than one place at the same time, rebuilt slowly through memory and adaptation, carried forward deliberately across generations, and held as quiet proof that even across borders, celebration can be learned again.
Dedicated to my siblings and my aunts, the keepers of our traditions, across generations and borders.
