Camas High School (CHS) provides the opportunity for students from other countries to live with host families and join the community within Camas. 

After coming off of winter break, these foreign exchange students got to experience different holiday traditions and customs than what they were accustomed to and some that were similar to what they did back home.

A big difference in tradition for both CHS senior Sabrina Reia, from Italy, and CHS junior Aroa Fernandez Delgado, from Spain, is that their host families decorate real Christmas trees instead of fake ones. 

“[In Camas] you have real Christmas trees and ours back in Spain are fake so that is like an American thing [I have noticed],” Delgado said. 

For Reia, she did not notice many differences between how she celebrated Christmas in Italy compared to how she celebrated Christmas with her host family. 

“We have the same traditions [like] we have lunch together, we have dinner together, [normally in Italy] we open presents at midnight but my host mom said that some people do that here,” Reia said. “The Christmas tree [however] is very different because we do not use real Christmas trees so that was really fun [to experience].” 

Reia and CHS senior and French exchange student, Robin Charent, also noticed that both of their host families had stockings hung up by the chimney—which was not a tradition for them. 

On the other hand, there are culture-specific traditions that these students have with their families that are not done by their host families.

“We put shoes under the trees for Santa [instead] of just putting the presents everywhere,” Charent said.

“Where I live in Spain, on the day before winter break, we have a big festival where we all dress up in traditional costumes, which [for me] is a dress, and we participate in different dances and we play games,” Delgado said.

While their experiences during this winter break were different than what they were used to, the shared sentiment between all three is that they enjoyed spending time with their host families and their friends, and none of them were too homesick. 

When it comes to making the holidays an enjoyable experience for those who are thousands of miles away from their homes, CHS teacher Brian Gage, who was also a host for a foreign exchange student, said that it was important to ask his exchange student how she normally celebrated. 

“We asked our exchange student from Italy what she did back at home so we could try and do some of those things here and to make that experience [better] her family sent us food [so she could still have that aspect of the holidays],” Gage said. 

By communicating with his exchange student, Gage was able to provide an enjoyable holiday season for her and connect with her family as well; now the families visit each other during the summertime.