Expat Travel Mom

When you've moved overseas, away from all things familiar, the holidays can feel like the hardest season to recreate. December 2021 was our last Christmas in Singapore before Spain, and by then, after eight years here, we'd finally figured out exactly how this island does the holidays. Spoiler: it does them well.

The Orchard Road Light-Up

This one's been running since 1984, a full-on tradition, not a passing trend. Every year, the two-mile stretch of Orchard Road, from Tanglin to Dhoby Ghaut, gets wrapped in lights and festive displays, usually switching on in early November and running clear through New Year's. An evening stroll down Orchard during the season is basically mandatory, and it's completely free. And the Christmas trees! Count how many you can find! It's really a magical time, and you almost forget there's no real snow and you're in the tropics!

Christmas Wonderland at Gardens by the Bay

If Orchard Road is the classic, Christmas Wonderland is the spectacle. Held at the Supertree Grove, this is Singapore's biggest yuletide event, light displays, a European-style Christmas market, an ice skating rink, carnival games, and food stalls scattered throughout. The real showstopper is Garden Rhapsody, the nightly light and sound show where the Supertrees themselves light up in time to Christmas classics, followed by "Blizzard Time," an actual snowfall effect over the grove. Watching real snow, however fake, drift down in tropical Singapore never stopped being surreal, even after years of living here.

Ice Skating

For a taste of a proper winter activity, Singapore's "ice rinks" come alive during the season, an easy way to trade the year-round heat for a few minutes of cold hands and wobbly ankles with the kids.

Universal Studios Goes Full Holiday Mode

If you're already planning a trip to Universal Studios Singapore, the holiday season is genuinely the best time to go. The park leans all the way into it, decorations, seasonal shows, and its own festive flair layered right on top of the usual rides.

Finding a Tree of Your Own

If you want the real thing rather than a mall display, a handful of nurseries around the island carry live Christmas trees each December, worth tracking down if a real tree at home matters to your family's tradition, the way it did for ours.

A Handmade Piece of the Season

Not every holiday tradition here fits the usual mold, and one of my favorite finds was was a hand-shaped cinnamon wood gingerbread house from the Tay Brothers. They make cinnamon wood figurines and joss sticks, and the piece I designed with them was as intricate as any gingerbread house set I've ever owned. This wood doesn't smell sweet the way cinnamon does, it actually comes from a sister species to the cinnamon tree. The figurines and joss sticks are made from fine cinnamon wood sawdust mixed with water, simple in theory.

Except it's not simple at all. The Tay Brothers make every single piece by hand, mixing the wood clay and shaping each figurine themselves, big ones, small ones, all molded and sculpted by a few pairs of human hands into genuine little works of art. Tay Yong Poh, Amos's father, first came up with the idea while making traditional dragon joss sticks for Chinese festivals. Amos and his brothers have carried the family tradition forward ever since, four generations deep now. They no longer make them, and they were the last of this art.

My nativity scene from them is one of the few things I made sure came home with us.

Being far from home during the holidays isn't always easy, but Singapore does a genuinely good job of closing that gap. Eight Christmases here, and this island always found a way to make it feel like the season, humidity and all.

Coming back to update: Christmas Wonderland at Gardens by the Bay has only grown since our years there, now spanning dozens of attractions and well over 100 hours of programming each season, including newer additions like a towering Christmas Pyramid and a flying Santa that didn't exist during our time on the island.