How do you celebrate holidays meant for friends and family when you are hundreds of miles away from earth? Well astronauts have to adopt new space friendly traditions around the holiday seasons. In the past astronauts have celebrated the holiday season with makeshift trees, Christmas themed clothing, and festive videos sent home. Starting in 1973 aboard the Skylab space station astronauts William R. Pouge, Gerald P. Carr, and Edward G. Gibson made a homemade christmas tree out of leftover food containers. They trimmed the new tree with colored decals as ornaments and topped it with a cardboard cutout of a comet. In 1993 when he was aboard STS-61 Hubble telescope repair mission, Jeffery A. Hoffman spent his first Hanukkah in space with a space walk. In addition he filmed a video holding a menorah and spinning a dreidel. 

In more recent times astronauts enjoy sending festive videos home for example aboard the International Space Station. They made a compilation of all Expeditions aborabe the Space Station. You can watch it here. The next year in 2020, the crew used an inflatable Earth in place of New York’s Time Square New Year’s Eve Ball. In addition, in 2022 Mark T. Vande Hei, Raja J. Chari, Kayla S. Barron, and Thomas H. Marshburn, and Matthias Maurer of the European Space Agency wrapped presents and shared what Christmas means to them.