From There to Here: Home for Christmas

Credit: Amy L. Hatch

By Amy L. Hatch

I’m not in Chambana right now.

Instead, I am at the first of three destinations that we will visit for the Christmas holidays. Here, at my husband’s grandfather’s house in Cleveland, I am sitting next to the crib as I write this, waiting for my son to fall asleep in a room that is strange to him.

It is not a strange room for me; I slept in this room for the first time more than 12 years ago, the first time I came to meet my husband’s extended family. I bunked down on the sofa bed, he slept in the same room where he laid his head so many times as a boy.

It is so familiar to me here, like an old sweater that you’ve worn so often that the color has all but disappeared. “Make yourself at home,” Pop says.

In so many ways, I am home.

Thursday night, for the first time in nearly five years, I will spend Christmas Eve under my mother’s roof. Our family situation and our travels have conspired over the years to find us driving to Rochester on Christmas morning.

This year, we will wake up together: me, my husband, our two children and my mother.

I can’t tell you about the holidays of my own childhood because they were so idyllic as to sound fabricated. The fire cracking, my parents in their robes, the pile of gifts that — to my young eyes — glistened in great sloping piles under the real pine tree that we all cut down together and decorated on a Saturday night.

Maybe those mornings weren’t perfect, I see now. My parents may have been bleary-eyed from making too many cookies and wrapping too many gifts. They may have been seething at one another over the money spent on tight budgets. They may have argued over where to spend Christmas day — at home, or with the grandparents and other relatives.

But oh! In my mind’s eye, and in my heart, those Christmas mornings have taken on the soft and rosy glow of nostalgia.

We live in Chambana. My tax return says so, as do all my daily routines. My life is there. But for the first time in a very long time, I will be home for Christmas.

Happy holidays to you and yours, where ever this Christmas morning finds you.

Amy L. Hatch is a co-founder of chambanamoms.com, and she just pretends to hate Christmas. She writes “From Here to There,” a column about being a Northeastern girl on the prairie, on Tuesdays. You can reach her at amy@chambanamoms.com.

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