WENTY-YEAR-OLD Rahma Chtaiki will celebrate the new year the way many Americans celebrate Christmas.
She'll give gifts to her family and friends. She'll send out greeting cards. On the evening of Dec. 31, she'll eat a large, carefully prepared dinner of chicken and many side dishes with her family.
Chtaiki moved to Fredericksburg from Morocco two years ago with her mother and sister. Christmas isn't observed there, so New Year's is one of the biggest celebrations, she said.
"We give presents, just like Christmas. The little kids get toys."
Even though the Chtaiki family lives in the United States now, they still ring in the new year the way they did in Morocco.
On New Year's Eve, there will be "music, some dancing, some drinking," said Chtaiki, who takes English classes through the Regional Adult Education program.
They'll make a big cake decorated with "2005." At midnight, she said, "we blow out a big candle."
In 2000, more than 10,000 people across the region were foreign-born, according to the U.S. Census.
When folks immigrate to the United States from another country, many, like Chtaiki, bring their cultures with them.
While the holidays mean family and roots and home to most, it makes sense that people celebrate the way they've always celebrated, the way their parents and grandparents celebrated.
They mark Christmas and New Year's Eve traditionally, with customs unique to their native countries.
Minty Flude is a fifth-grade teacher at Stafford's Widewater Elementary, on exchange here from England for a year. Her family will join her for the Christmas holiday, and they'll celebrate traditionally.
The family starts Christmas morning with a glass of Bucks Fizz, a cocktail of champagne and orange juice. While they drink, they open presents.
Back in England, the Fludes would have gone to a nearby pub to have a celebratory drink with friends, followed by a stroll home.
"Many people wear paper hats and pull crackers," Flude wrote in an e-mail. Crackers are tubes covered in paper with little prizes inside. You pull a tab to open it, and it makes a popping noise.
Dinner is always an elaborate meal. Flude chooses the first course, "usually something like pate and toast or shrimp cocktail," she said.
Then they eat turkey, roasted and mashed potatoes, braised red cabbage, roasted parsnips and more. Christmas pudding is the final dish.
Flude said she looks forward to sharing some of these traditions with her new American friends.
Magdolli Vega moved to Spotsylvania from Peru five years ago. She celebrates Christmas on Dec. 24.
At midnight, she and her husband and their two children say a prayer around the Nativity. The family drinks hot chocolate and eats bread made with raisins and dried fruits.
"After midnight, we open gifts and sing songs for Jesus," Vega said.
At the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve, each person will eat 12 grapes for good luck--one for each month. Then they run around the house with a suitcase, in hopes of good travels in the new year.
Many Christmas customs commonly practiced in the United States today were brought here by immigrants decades ago.
People first sent Christmas cards in England in the 1840s.
Putting candles in the windows may have come from Ireland, when people placed them there to let fugitive priests know they could come inside and pray, according to the book "Celebrations: The Complete Book of American Holidays."
Modern-day Christmas trees likely originated in 15th- or 16th-century Germany. And poinsettias, the red-petaled flower associated with the season, came from Mexico.
Sandra Rodriguez is the mother of three children, ages 12, 11 and 1. This Christmas, her kids will be visited not by the man in red, but by the three kings of the Orient.
The Christian faith teaches that the kings, or wise men, visited baby Jesus in Bethlehem shortly after his birth.
"The kids put shoes on the window or in front of the tree," explained Rodriguez, who moved to Virginia from Mexico a decade ago.
A wish list goes inside the shoes. Rodriguez said the three kings will leave gifts on Christmas Eve and Jan. 6--a slight change from Mexican tradition.
Here, her kids get gifts both days, she said with a smile.
"In my country, only one."
To reach KRISTIN DAVIS: 540/368-5028 kdavis@freelancestar.com