Home for the Holidays (For The Last Time)

As a prone wander, it was still bittersweet to spend my last Christmas ever in the house that I grew up in.

It’s true that I haven’t lived in the house since leaving for college, but it was still the house that my parents have called home for thirty four years and the only one that lives in my childhood memories. Alas, the time has come for them to move onto brighter and warmer places than Northeast, Ohio. At the end of January, the moving truck will pack up what goods they haven’t sold on Ebay or Craigslist, maybe even a scrap or two of memories, and move them to a retirement community in Florida.

I really can’t blame them for wanting to move on. After all, they had raised me to be the gypsy that I’ve become. Since leaving for college I lived in Athens, Ohio; Cuenca, Ecuador, Nashville, Tennessee; Washington, DC; Miami, Florida; Cleveland, Ohio; and Charlotte, North Carolina. I understand their yearning for new walls to decorate and new watering holes to call their corner bar. But it was still tough to walk the halls of home for the last time, to sleep in my childhood bedroom for the last night ever, to linger over the final meal in the place I’ve eaten more meals than anyplace else, to know that next year a new family will be building over our Christmas memories.

The House I Grew Up In – Sounds Like A Lyric from a Nickelback Song

Anticipation was high as I envisioned the best Christmas ever. You know, the kind that memories are made of and belong in a Hallmark movie. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. Christmas ended up a major flop. Both my Mom and Dad came down with the flu on Christmas Eve, I caught it the next day, and Grandma landed herself a night in the hospital from it. Let’s also not forget the blow-up I had with my uncle over the cooking the calamari sauce or the bout with vertigo I was fighting the entire time (and still am). Now let’s mix in the stress of figuring out whether to pack, sell, or scrap over thirty years of stuff, and you have a Christmas more dysfunctional than a mutation between Christmas Story and Christmas Vacation where good intentions wind up poorly executed and feelings are hurt.

But as I look back on our last Christmas at home, I realized that was the Christmas we needed.

Moving is tough, saying goodbye is difficult, and change can be scarier than public speaking. A Hallmark Christmas would have made this major change even more difficult for our family with second guesses on whether my parents are doing the right thing (they are). The perfect Christmas would have made us become even more attached to that house which is kind of crazy when you think about it. A perfect Christmas would have made us more attached to a lifeless structure.

This is where I think we take the concept of home too far. We attach all of the love and memories that dwell within family and assign them to wood, drywall, maybe a few bricks, and shingles instead of where they belong – between the people we made them with. I learned this lesson the hard way.

My Parents’ Living Room After the Christmas Present Explosion

I envisioned walking through the old house recalling various memories along the way – remembering when my bedroom was moved from the nursery across the hall to my “big boy” room, admiring the pencil marks where my parents tracked my height through the years, laughing over the microwave I exploded in junior high when I nuked a whole egg for five minutes just to see what would happened, recalling the first time I got drunk in high school down in the basement when Uncle Mike was supposed to be chaperoning my friends and I while my parents were out of town.

This walk never happened. If it did, the memories would have only been found in my head. After 34 years, most rooms don’t look anything like they did in my recollections. That bedroom has seen three new paint and carpet schemes, the height marks had been painted over, the microwave is obviously gone, and the basement has gone through as many iterations as my bedroom. The house didn’t hold the memories. The house wasn’t home. The laughs and probably too many glasses of wine we had over our final dinner was home. Those laughs and that moment will continue to be recreated no matter what house our family calls home at the moment.

The Dinette Where Countless Meals Were Shared

As I drove out of Niles past the empty lot where my elementary school once stood, the retirement home that sits where my junior high school loomed tall, and the new high school that was built over the bulldozed ruins of the building I have both fond and fearful memories, I wasn’t sad that my past appears to have been erased. Instead, I felt opportunistic. I was excited for my parent’s new house in Florida and even looked forward to spending our first holiday there. Heck, maybe even Mrs. G. and I would have the opportunity to host Christmas or Thanksgiving at our house!

I also became a little restless myself. We’ve lived in Charlotte for eight years and in our townhouse for six. Was it time for us to move-on? Were we becoming guilty of assigning our concept of home to a lifeless structure? Should we have taken that temporary assignment in Puebla, Mexico a few years back? Had we become too comfortable? These are all questions that I’m sure we’ll be wrestling with as we plot out our New Years Resolutions. Has my current definition of home become too assigned to one place?

In case you couldn’t tell from that last paragraph, there are some major announcements lined up here at The Wandering Gourmand for 2015.  Be the first to know about them by signing up for our newsletter:

What about you? How do you define the concept of home?