Things I've learned from celebrating Christmas in Istanbul

• Turkey is way more expensive than chicken in the supermarket. Like 2.5x per kg more expensive. And I don't even think turkey tastes better than chicken.

• If you invite over a group of international friends for Christmas dinner and have Yorkshire puddings, be prepared for questions. "Do only people from Yorkshire eat them? Is it savoury or sweet? Why is it called a pudding?"

• Similarly, do not make cultural assumptions and forget to tell people that we pour gravy on our food rather than in our glasses. Thankfully one of our guests clarified first.

• And when your mother has lovingly brought over a Christmas pudding because she knows how much her son-in-law appreciates Christmas pudding and you are planning on serving that Christmas pudding to guests, remember that bought Christmas puddings generally require a microwave (or more hob space than we had available since we were also cooking Christmas dinner at the same time). We don't have a microwave. But we can now confirm that Christmas pudding can be heated in a slow cooker (but if you are cooking your chicken in the slow cooker, best leave the pudding for another day...).

• It is strangely difficult to find rolls of wrapping paper here. But if you happen to be in IKEA after Christmas, you can buy some for next year.

• Small things will catch you out, like when you catch yourself thinking, "oh, maybe I can order that online in the post-Christmas sales" then suddenly realise there won't be post Christmas sales. 

• Shops don't close early on Christmas Eve! And they're even open on Christmas Day, should you need it.

• Christmas will feel much less commercialised if you live in a country where most people don't celebrate Christmas. 

• Even if most people don't celebrate Christmas, you may still find that there is one flat on your street with an inflatable Santa on a ladder hanging off an outside window.

• There is no list of "things you must have/do/see" for it to feel like a "real Christmas". It's great to be able to start and continue traditions where we can but our traditions should come second to serving others and making them comfortable. 

• In a similar vein, I had visions of starting a new tradition of a cosy Christmas Eve spent watching a Christmas film together as a family until I realised that often there are Christmas Eve carol services here so that new tradition was never going to get off the ground. I would like to tell you that I was super-enthusiastic from the start about getting to go and celebrate the birth of a certain baby at a carol service that would fall directly over J's tea time and lead to a delayed bedtime for him but unfortunately that wasn't quite the case. However, in the end I was glad that we could go and afterwards I was even more glad that we'd gone. More importantly, I was reminded that the baby whose birth we celebrate at Christmas shapes our traditions, not the other way around.