For many, Christmas is a time to be spent with family and friends. As a college student, I often use the season to visit friends I haven’t seen since high school and enjoy time with my family. This year, however, both of those were impossible. 

Seeing all of my friends with their families, pets and even each other, made it painfully obvious that this year’s Christmas wasn’t going to have the same focus on family that it had previously.

Despite making my way through the many Christmas markets of Germany and trying to find as much Christmas cheer as possible, I found myself feeling particularly homesick. I was unable to see my own family, and that made all of the cheer and festivities feel a bit more empty than usual.

Initially, I was nervous that I’d have to spend the holidays completely alone. With most other students returning home for the holidays, my chances of spending the holidays surrounded by others were seeming increasingly doomed. I had nearly accepted my fate of a lonely Christmas when I received a message from a friend of mine who had spent a year at Monroe High School as a German exchange student, asking if I would want to spend Christmas at her house.

I wasn’t able to spend the holidays with my immediate family, but I was able to spend it as I have spent this whole year: finding and building my own family through the friendship and generosity of others.

Along with the chance to extend my family a bit further, I was able to experience a true German Christmas. From candle-lit trees to pounds of lebkuchen, my hosts were sure to show me every aspect of a German Christmas that I had been missing my whole life. They certainly exemplified the season’s focus on love, generosity and giving. 

If my time abroad has taught me one thing, it’s that family can extend so much farther than those we’re related to by blood. I have been welcomed with open arms into an international family that needs no borders, and has allowed me to feel at home so far from it. 

— Shannon Rabotski is a 2016 graduate of Monroe High School and is a junior at Drake University. She is spending the year studying abroad in Tubingen, Germany. She can be reached at shannon.rabotski@drake.edu.