It’s that time of year again…and a typical conversation in Chile during the holidays starts off like this:
“Que atroz! How terrible! I am muuuyyy busy. You know…it is end of school year, graduation, parties, Christmas, New Year’s and summer vacation. Ayayay es demasiado!.”
This is followed by an exasperated, gasping tone for added affect and the clincher, “Nos vemos el próximo año”. See you next year.
Next year?? All I asked was cómo anda todo?!
The holidays have always been a disorienting time of the year ever since I moved down to these latitudes. While I do make it up north some years, most I do not, and spending them in Chile always provokes a bout of seasonal home sickness.
Every. Single. Year.
Let’s start with the obvious. It’s warm here during the holiday season from Thanksgiving to New Year’s. Hot as in I-am-melting-in-this-heat. With the seasons being flipped 180-degrees in the southern hemisphere, by Christmas, we are at the peak of summer with temperatures well into the 90s. Peaches, corn, and watermelon are on every table and people gather around pools with Sauvignon Blanc in hand–not by the fire place sipping spiked eggnog.
In fact, Christmas can feel quite elusive here if you aren’t at a supermarket or mall with all the decor. Many Chileans only decorate a few days before Christmas Eve and lights are not strung across the city.
As I can never resist a mindless scroll on Instagram, when I do, damn those cozy, beautiful images of snow falling, glistening cookies, gleaming turkeys, glittering lights, and primped Christmas trees. That imagery can quickly take me to a lonely place in my mind. It creates instant separation anxiety from all the warmth of festivities happening up north, almost like a self-imposed holiday exile.
It’s my own doing, really. I have chosen not to go for one reason or another–work, family, too much travel in the year (my justification this year). What always lingers, though, is the notion of the holidays being a distant memory. And since the summer environment doesn’t match those memories, I get totally lost.
Yes, pretty much my entire sense of the holidays has been built around nostalgia—at least since I left the US. Another time, another place, another Liz. It’s a weird longing that generates this short yet intense desire to return and be part of it. By New Year’s, the feeling has faded and I bury the “seasonal homesickness” again until the next time.
This year, though, I have really felt the need to confront it. Enough is enough.
I have been here way too loooooong for this to continue. Particularly now, as our kids reach the age to have their own holiday memories here in Chile, not the US, I want to have peace around this. The holidays cannot be based on what I am missing, nor mindlessly recreating the northern traditions I inherited from my family. They have to be aligned with who I am now, and who we are, as a family.
—
I inadvertently delve into this on Thanksgiving morning when my four year-old daughter, Micaela, crawls into my bed.
Her: “Mommy, why didn’t I go to school today?”
Me: “Because it’s Thanksgiving. It’s a special holiday in the United States.”
Her: Blank stare.
Me, continuing: “Well, it’s a day where everyone gives thanks for all they have in life.”
She pauses and says matter-of-factly, “But you say we should feel thankful every day.”
Very true.
Me: “Well, today in the country where I was born and part of your family lives, they all come together to be thankful and eat turkey”.
She raises her eye brows: “Turkey???”
Me: “Yes, turkey.”
With a disgusted sigh, she gets out of bed and says: “I don’t like turkey, Mom.”
She goes off to play and we completely drop the subject of Thanksgiving altogether.
Somehow, though, it was one of those moments of intense shame that I could not escape. You know…when you feel like you should be doing something that you are not, and you are going to be judged for it.
“Yes”, I think to myself, “I should be slaving in the kitchen and giving the kids a taste of what Thanksgiving is. It’s part of their heritage. I am so un-American if I don’t.”
And on and on went that annoying voice. The truth is that I really didn’t want to prepare a traditional Thanksgiving dinner; and the spirit has never moved me to do it in all these years. Like Micaela, I have never been a huge fan of turkey nor stuffing, and where is it written that I have to recreate the Thanksgiving flavors of my childhood in order to celebrate that day??
I carry on with the work day, completely oblivious to my phone. Around dinner time, I notice a series of texts from my family in Chicago, Pennsylvania, and Florida.
“Happy Thanksgiving!” The greeting is followed by a football / beer / turkey / pie / cocktail, icon.
So strange. Not even a single phone call? Is this modern Thanksgiving now in the US?
Oddly enough, a nostalgic cord strikes and I feel that familiar sensation of guilt rising in my gut. Yep, there it is…somehow I should be celebrating…but I am not. Isn’t Thanksgiving supposed to be my favorite holiday as an expat?? I brush the guilt off. I am totally fine doing my own thing, aren’t I?
—
The next Saturday, we go to a Friendsgiving dinner where everyone opens up and shares stories from their memories of Thanksgiving in the US. It is a total trip down nostalgia lane. Doing the math, I quickly realize the last time I actually celebrated Thanksgiving in the US I was in college. COLLEGE.
And there it is again. That seasonal home sickness staring me straight in the face, dressed up as nostalgia. It is really trying hard to tie me to another time, another country, another identity. A past that seems idealized yet completely out of context now. I can appreciate how others may want to carry on these traditions, but I feel they are totally irrelevant to who I am today.
I have to create new ones.
Is this what happens when you live abroad for so long? Do you either yearn to go back to what is familiar, or, at some point, sever the cord with your “birth country”? Can you truly open yourself up to adopting a new identity and new ways of celebrating that don’t necessarily have anything to do with where you were born?
The big question for me, though, is: what does home mean now? Is it the place? The people? My house? A moment in time?
This straddling of two worlds is realllllly uncomfortable. I am living in the holidays of the past and feeling as if I am missing something–which is mostly the present moment. I long to be some place known; some place stable. It’s that sensation of aching to see someone that you love desperately and cannot be reunited with them. That is the only way to explain how the holidays have always felt to me here. Total saudade, as the Brazilians would call this longing nostalgia.
—
A few weeks later, still toiling with my “seasonal issue,” I set out on my nightly meditative sunset walk in Parque Forestal. The tall trees are shrouded by this gorgeous golden light as the sun sinks into the western horizon.
It suddenly hits me what is causing all this suffering. I have been searching for “home” as something external to who I am.
Shhhiiiiitttt, what I am missing is myself! I have to let go of all these past constructs of what the holidays are. I can cherish those memories, but I have to let them go. I cannot be chained to them anymore—not in this way that is causing so much suffering and separation anxiety.
Home is not my idealized childhood in Pennsylvania nor the Northeast US where I grew up. It is not even Chile nor Santiago where I live now. Home is how I feel with myself. It is a place I can go every moment of every day. Home is the place from where I (joyfully) project myself into my daily life—and none of this happens exclusively at the holidays nor requires consuming specific foods to go there.
I can live there all the time.
That semi-cheesy saying, “Home is where the heart is” suddenly pops into my mind. It doesn’t matter where I live, home will always be with me—inside of me.
The idea is so liberating. I feel a release of the need to carry on the traditions for the holidays that have felt like going through the motions. My kids can grow up having their own childhood memories of the holidays, not a regurgitation of mine. Sure, we put up a beautiful tree (which I do love), but I vow to let them create their own independent memories, too.
They can know the delights of a hot Christmas with cherries instead of cookies; a dip in the pool instead of making snow angels; sunset at 9pm instead of darkness at 4pm; and I definitely won’t torture them with turkey and stuffing—perhaps our traditional tortilla de papas and gazpacho are more fitting fare.
Most importantly, when I feel at home with myself, I project that contentedness into our family life.
I get that tingly feeling of downloading an aha–that simultaneous YES! followed by a deep knowing throughout my whole body.
Finally, I get it.
Home is in me…for the holidays…and forever and ever.
