I'm an Aussie so why celebrate Thanksgiving?

"So, what will you do for Thanksgiving?", asked one of my students.

My mind whirred, as I tried to come up with an answer to something I've never even thought about.

"Er, nothing", I eventually replied, "it's not a part of my culture."

At this, there was a sharp intake of breath, as if I'd said that I enjoyed pulling the wings off flies.

"But, sir, everyone knows that foreigners celebrate Thanksgiving, so why don't you?"

Sometimes, there are moments when I hate TV.

My students seem to spend an awful lot of time watching TV shows, and this shapes their perception of the world around them. As most of the "foreign" shows they watch are American, they tend to think that everything American applies to the rest of the world.

Unfortunately for me, it doesn't.

In Australia, we don't celebrate Thanksgiving, as it's purely a North American holiday, marked in the US and Canada - and on different days. After my encounter in the classroom, I went and asked a couple of my American colleagues when Thanksgiving actually fell, and I was surprised to find out it was not a set date each year!

My students have also asked me about Halloween, another celebration I know little about. When I was growing up in Australia, Halloween would come and go, and no one would really be any the wiser. Children certainly didn't go "trick or treating" from house to house.

It is only recently that the rise in consumerism has brought these ideas to Australia and China. I was surprised to find Halloween candy displays in my local Tianjin supermarkets, and that my students were hosting a Halloween Ball on campus.

Colleagues from England are equally bemused by questions about Thanksgiving, as they have their own cultural celebrations as well. On Nov 5, I helped them to put together a celebration for Guy Fawkes Day, which marks the failed attempt to blow up Westminster and King James I in 1605. I had to go away and do some research as to what people actually did to celebrate the event - light bonfires and set off fireworks - as it wasn't a part of my cultural heritage. In the end, we couldn't get any fireworks, and if we had, we wouldn't have been allowed to set them off on the campus, so we settled for jacket potatoes and soup, with my barbecue standing in for a traditional bonfire.

Students often ask me if Spring Festival is celebrated in Australia, and I'm delighted to tell them that it is. There is a huge Chinese population in Australia, and they have firmly carried the tradition with them. However, Spring Festival in Australia falls in the middle of summer, and fireworks are banned without a special permit. To get around this problem, I've seen people playing CDs of recordings of fireworks, which is one way to make enough noise to drive off evil spirits!

In China, there are many long-standing, traditional celebrations that take place throughout the year, but I can think of only a few uniquely Australian traditional celebrations - ANZAC Day, Australia Day and Melbourne Cup Day - that I've taken time out to mark while I've been living here. I've been more than just happy to go with the flow of the festivals around me, rather than try to inflict my own on other people.

As cross-cultural influences grow, and people travel to different places, they take with them parts of their own cultural heritage to new homes. Often they change and adapt to become part of a new heritage - but they are certainly not forgotten.