IT'S ONE MINUTE PAST MIDNIGHT on Thanksgiving in Shanghai and the night is fairly quiet. Thirty floors below, the sidewalk outside my apartment compound is buzzing at 70+ decibels with the noise of taxis, motor scooters, and street hawkers selling roasted yams out of repurposed oil drums and chestnuts roasted in woks full of hot sand. But up here on my balcony, there's not a sound to stand out against the dull roar background of a typical late Wednesday night.

Today is a holiday and what's missing is fireworks. If this were the first day of the Mid-Autumn Festival, there would be fireworks. If this were Chinese New Year, there would definitely be fireworks. And if this were Christmas Eve, surprisingly, there also might be one or two crackers let loose into the damp air. As grave-voiced Chinese commentators have lately noted, there has been an explosion of Christmas onto the Shanghai consumer scene. What a decade ago was a holiday only celebrated by the most trend-seeking Shanghainese is now a full-fledged local festival of tinsel, ribbon, and corporate logos.

So where does that leave Thanksgiving?

Thanksgiving is a tough sell. It's not sexy, not flashy, and not expensive. You don't buy gifts and you don't go out drinking. It makes an awful nightclub promotion. Chinese or foreign, most people would rather see models dressed as sexy Santas and naughty elves than preening poultry. The only novelty turkey I found on display this year was leaning in front of an empty café, its sagging, deflated head looking like it had been bashed in. Shanghai is in many ways an adolescent town, and Thanksgiving a child's holiday, celebrating the toddler's comforts of family love and gluttony.

Of course, it may be that Thanksgiving hasn't taken off precisely because it's a family holiday. The locals already make three pilgrimages home each year (at New Year’s then in May and October) to see their families and spread a little of Shanghai's bounty across the rest of the provinces, so they don't need another long holiday to pile onto planes and trains five-deep.

But for many expatriates, the dirty truth is that leaving family behind was part of the benefits package. I know people who haven't been home in a decade, happy to cash in their holiday time in Thailand instead of Toledo.

Family duty is relegated to shuttling around Midwestern moms and younger siblings on a once in a lifetime Asian adventure, taking them out to a nice Chinese meal somewhere with clean dishes and an English menu while they embarrass you in front of all your friends by asking the same questions you asked yourself only six months before: "Why is there no toilet paper in the bathroom?" "Why don't you tip the taxi drivers?" "Why doesn't your kitchen have an oven?"

Instead, Thanksgiving becomes your chance to spend time with a new family—sometimes as accidentally assembled as the old—a collection of coworkers, sometime-lovers, and friends of friends that helped you get on your feet when you landed here and have held your hair through many a Happy Hour since. With these new friends, you can form new rituals: the scavenger hunt for corn bread and cranberry sauce, the annual game of "Who has an oven?"

Many of us will go home for Christmas next month, and the rest will make it to the beaches of Sanya or Phuket, but we're all here now, and we're all in it together. No nightclubs, no shopping—just a house full of friends, all the cans of cranberry sauce I could find, and the requisite tray of baijiu Jell-O shots.

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Summer Block Kumar is an American writer living in Shanghai.