WHAT AMERICAN HOLIDAYS FEEL LIKE LIVING ABROAD

It's Memorial Day weekend back home in New Jersey.

And I'm here. In the UK. Where it is grey and perfectly pleasant and absolutely nothing like the Shore.

Every year around this time, something shifts in me. Not sadness exactly — more like a specific awareness. The kind that comes from being far away from a place when one of its rituals comes around without you.

I've been living in the UK for a few years now. And for the most part, the distance feels manageable. You find your rhythm. You build a life. You stop converting everything to dollars.

But Memorial Day is one of those days that makes the distance very concrete.

It's not the big holidays that catch you off guard when you live abroad. It's the specific ones. The ones with a smell to them.

What Memorial Day Actually Is (For Anyone Who Didn't Grow Up With It)

If you're reading this from the UK or elsewhere, here's the context: Memorial Day is a US federal holiday, observed on the last Monday of May.

Officially, it's a day of remembrance for the men and women who died in military service.

That part is real. And it matters. I want to say that clearly before anything else.

But Memorial Day is also — and any American will know exactly what I mean — the unofficial start of summer.

The pools open. The beaches fill. The barbecues come out of garages that have been closed since October. The roads to the shore become a particular kind of chaos that is somehow, inexplicably, part of the charm.

It holds both things at once: solemnity and celebration, sitting right next to each other. Which is, when you think about it, a very American thing to do.

Growing Up in New Jersey: What the Weekend Actually Looked Like

Memorial Day weekend in New Jersey had a specific sequence when I was growing up. And sequences are everything — they're what turn a day into a ritual.

It started at the cemetery.

My dad was there for the 21 gun salute. And I remember standing as a kid — young enough that the sound still startled me every time even though I knew it was coming — watching the careful placement of flags at headstones. Watching grown men in uniform mark the absence of people who weren't there anymore.

There's something about that specific image that stays with you. The formality of it. The way it made you aware, even as a child, that the long weekend ahead meant something more than you fully understood yet.

And then — the shift.

Because after that, it was the beach. Or the barbecue. Usually both.

The smell of sunscreen and charcoal. The specific quality of that first genuinely warm weekend after a New Jersey winter — which is long and grey and not remotely romantic. The way everyone seems slightly disbelieving that warmth has returned, like every year it comes as a genuine surprise.

Neighbours in their yards. Music from somewhere down the street. Kids on bikes.

And at some point in the afternoon, without fail: Born to Run.

Born to Run is a song about escaping New Jersey. And yet it's the most New Jersey song ever written.

I know that sounds like a cliché. But if you grew up there and tell me you didn't hear Bruce Springsteen at some outdoor gathering on Memorial Day weekend, I'm not entirely sure I believe you.

Because in New Jersey, Born to Run isn't just a song. It's a feeling. It's about wanting something more. About the restlessness of being young in a place that feels simultaneously like home and like a starting point.

And the thing I've only really understood since I left: the song is about escaping New Jersey, and it is also the most New Jersey thing ever recorded. Both completely true at the same time.

What Living Abroad Actually Does to Your Relationship With Home

Nobody warns you about this part.

When people talk about the experience of living abroad, they usually focus on the big stuff. The culture shock. The paperwork. The language (or in my case, the version of English that somehow still requires constant translation).

What they don't tell you is that it's the specific rituals that catch you off guard.

Not Christmas. Not Thanksgiving. Those are big enough that you plan around them, call home, make them work.

It's the ones with a texture to them. The ones that happen the same way, at the same time, every year, and that you were simply always just in — without ever having to think about it.

Memorial Day weekend is one of mine.

This year I'm not in New Jersey. I'm in the UK, where it is an ordinary Thursday and nobody is fighting traffic on the Garden State Parkway and the Shore is 3,000 miles away.

And what I've noticed — what I find genuinely interesting — is that being away from it has made me pay more attention to it than I ever did when I was there.

When you're home, Memorial Day just happens. You're in it. It goes by.

From here, I'm actually thinking about it.

Remembering the specific parts. Being grateful for them.

Distance doesn't diminish a place. Sometimes it just brings it into focus.

The American Expat Experience: Missing Home Without Knowing How to Say It

There's a particular brand of homesickness that American expats don't talk about much, possibly because Americans aren't always great at admitting vulnerability, and possibly because 'I miss my home state's bank holiday weekend' sounds less serious than it actually is.

But it's real. And it's specific.

It's not that life here is worse — it genuinely isn't. Britain has given me things I didn't know I needed. A different pace. A different sense of humour. A relationship with history that America, as a young country, can't quite replicate.

But America gave me something too. A particular way of moving through the world. A certain loudness. A belief that things can always be bigger and better and more. And a set of seasonal rituals — Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Thanksgiving — that are woven into who I am at a level that doesn't entirely translate.

Memorial Day is the start of that summer sequence.

And being away from it makes it feel more significant, not less.

What I'd Say to Anyone Stateside This Weekend

Enjoy it. Actually enjoy it — not in a performative way, but in the way you probably don't when you're just in it by default.

The beach will be crowded. The traffic will be impossible. Someone will bring a speaker and play something you didn't ask for. The charcoal will take longer than anyone expects.

All of that is the point.

And if you happen to hear Born to Run at some point on Monday — standing in someone's backyard, or driving with the windows down, or coming from a neighbour's house — think of everyone who isn't there this year.

We're paying attention from a distance.

Happy Memorial Day.

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I made a video about this today on The Hickson Diaries YouTube channel — if you want to hear the longer version, it's linked below. And if you're an expat with a holiday that catches you off guard every year, I'd genuinely love to hear about it in the comments.