Home for the Holidays

It’s cloudy outside and my Austrian conditioned body immediately thinks it’s cold.  I check the weather. Nope. 72 F (22 C).  It is too warm for the middle of November.  I head out the door in my August clothes, open-toed sandals and all, to go to the grocery store in my car.  I take the agonizingly long 5 minute drive to the store, grab my extra huge basket that doesn’t require a coin deposit and head into the store that’s larger than all 3 of my neighborhood stores in Vienna combined.  It’s been a hard day, cloudy ones always are.  I’m not sure if that’s because of a natural human disposition toward depression on cloudy days or because cloudy days remind me of Vienna.

As I take the first turn down an aisle in the store, I’m bombarded by holiday decorations - Thanksgiving on one side, Christmas on the other.  Ugh, my day just got worse.  I do not even want to think about the upcoming holidays.  They are looming ominously in front of me, and I know I can’t avoid dealing with them much longer, but I’m trying to put them out of my mind as long as possible.  It’s easier when it still feels like summer outside.

It will be our first Thanksgiving and Christmas back “home,” away from “home.” 

If you’ve ever lived in a culture other than your home culture, I know you get me.  And everyone else is saying “What? Aren’t you thankful to be with your family this year?”  And the short answer to that question is “Yes.” But there is a longer, more complicated answer which lies at the heart of how I feel about the upcoming holiday celebrations.

We are grateful to spend time with our family this year.  It has been five years since we spent Thanksgiving and Christmas together. Unfortunately, that’s part of the extra stressors that will add to our holiday celebrations. We are not the same people that we were five years ago.  We have changed.  The different life experiences that we have had over the past few years have made us into the people we are today.  Before we moved to Austria, we felt like our families didn’t really understand all of our quirks and nuances sometimes.  We are at a whole new level of strange now.  

And our families have changed, too.  When you live overseas, it’s often difficult to keep up with all the “little” developments that are shaping your families back home.  How do you really know a person you see a few days every two years?  So our families will be different, too.  We need to understand how to accept them as the people they are now instead of how we expect them to be based on a five year old opinion.  The entire celebration may end up being as awkward as a junior high dance as we try to decide the best way to approach each other without tripping over our own insecurities.

On my side, the family doesn’t even look the same.  We’ve added a member, and we’re missing another. This will be the first time my family has celebrated Thanksgiving and Christmas together since my Dad died in 2013.  It’s going to be tough.  Everyone will have raw emotions and tender hearts.  The things that cause grief are often small and unexpected so you can’t really prepare for what’s going to tug at your heart strings in that moment.  We will have to give each other permission to cry and laugh and talk about Dad and leave the room if we need to and get angry and still love each other.  This holiday season is part of healing, and dealing with the grief of missing someone you love is not easy.

Then, there’s the grief my little Austrian – American family will be experiencing on a totally different plane that our extended families may not be able to understand no matter how hard they try.  We are also mourning the loss of our International family and our Austrian holiday traditions while trying to redefine what it means to celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas back in America.

The first year we were in Austria was the first time we had ever celebrated these holidays without our families.  We didn’t have any of our own traditions, and we hadn’t built strong enough relationships with people in Vienna at that point to share the holidays with them. But, over time, we figured out how to “do” Thanksgiving and Christmas with our overseas family and make it a special time.  Many of those traditions won’t transfer to life in America so this year will be very similar to our first year in Vienna. 

We can watch football on Thanksgiving Day.  But it won’t compare to the almost palpable excitement of watching the only American football game of the year we were actually awake to see in real time blown up to life size proportions in the MPR.  Being surrounded by our family will be wonderful.  But we will miss our huge, chaotic group of spiritual brothers and sisters from around the world and a slightly smaller, intimate group of our closest friends who walked with us through those days last year when we didn’t even know if we wanted to breathe. We will put up a Christmas tree.  But the ornaments representing the different stages of our life are still in a box on another continent. We can make Christmas cookies and even open Advent calendars – thank you World Market.  But we won’t be able to visit our favorite Christkindl Markt, drink our favorite Punsch, or eat Krapfen the size of our heads. We will open gifts on Christmas morning, but we won’t have Aunt Marci’s cinnamon rolls for breakfast.  And we can ring in the New Year.  But we won’t be watching the sky explode in showers of color from the river near downtown.  Or dancing the salsa with our friends until the wee hours of the morning.  We will grieve the loss of these traditions and many others; it’s a normal part of dealing with change. And the grief from not experiencing those traditions may manifest itself in ways that are not expected and are not easily explained.

As I push my basket down the grocery store aisle, away from any reminders of the coming season, I know that it’s the emotion and the pain that I really want to avoid rather than the holidays.  In my head, I know that grieving is a healthy, normal part of the healing process.  But in my heart, I also know that this Thanksgiving and Christmas are going to be extremely difficult and excruciatingly painful, not just for me, but for the people I care most about.  I am praying for strength and wisdom for this holiday season.  And also for open eyes, so that when pain manifests itself in angry outbursts, hurtful words, and disobedient behavior that I will see the pain rather than the behavior and show compassion on the one that is hurting.  Finally, I am praying that I will learn to be grateful for what seems like a miserable situation.  While many people in the world have no home, I have two, and that makes me doubly fortunate.