Home? for the Holidays

As the holiday season approaches, I become quite maudlin and contemplative and sentimental, and think about the past, and picture all the people in the world returning to family and family homes for Christmas and New Year.  It sounds soppy but it fills me with a good vibe, and I guess that's the whole point.

And through the years, I have gone to many different 'homes' for the holidays.  My childhood was all bliss and long, glorious holidays with beach times, views of the Bay of St Francis, boats trip down the canal and the Kromme river.  It was a time that I didn't apprecaite enough while I was a child (isn't it always like that) and it's a time I bottled up like a fragrance and channel it, like a sensory injection, when I get stressed or lonely or homesick for that space and time.

There were also a number of Christmases on the farm in the Magaliesberg, with a Weber cooking chicken in the garden, and my sister and I running around chasing ducks and making fairy houses in the massive garden, and mandatory New Year's day picnic up in the mountains with the dogs.  And then as I got older there were the St Francis Christmases again, this time with my boyfriend, simple lovely times. 

Then I went to Scotland, where its almost impossible not to be immersed in the festivities, the short dark cold days, the snow...it felt like being inside one of those snow globes.  I spent two Decembers there, one on teh coast of Essex with a boyfriends family, and one near Aberdeen, so far north that on the winter soltice there was hardly even daylight.

Now we hope to return 'home' every year with our girls to our beloved farm, where we spent the first six months of this year.  We left alot of our stuff there, and Ashlee has been saying for weeks that she's going to go on the plane to the farm and see Spot the Dog, and Pinki., and Polly and the cats.  and with us moving around so much, maybe that is what she considers her home.  Often when we've been out, she'll say "Ashlee wants to go home."  And I wonder, having lived in as many different places as she has, where is her home?

I thought that maybe her home is ouma's house by the sea, because that's what she mentions the most.  Or maybe she will continue to  build homes, as the years go by, at school, and all over the world, like I did.  In this era that's probably how most children grow up, in transience.

Happy holidays to all.