There's No Place Like Home for the Holidays

There's something comforting about coming home for the holidays. We know it's a universal concept based on the dozens of holiday movies made on the subject each year. But the truth is, home is hard to define, and it changes over time. As children, your home is the house where your parents live. The place you go to bed with a heart full of anticipation as you await Christmas morning or the first night of Hannukah. Twenty or thirty years down the line, your parents' house may not feel like home at all. It's hard to put your finger on the feeling of home, but you know it when you feel it. It feels familiar, safe, and warm.

Since families come in different shapes and sizes with different holiday traditions, comparing experiences from person to person isn't easy. Some people have an unpleasant feeling about their childhood home or may not have a "home" to return to at all. Fortunately, home is more than a place. It's a feeling that you get to define for yourself. If you're lucky, the spirit of home sticks with you for the rest of our life.

No matter what season of life you're in, memories of past holidays surface this time of year. Some are joyful, others are sad, but all remind you of moments in your history that defined who you have become. After all, the core memories that establish your feeling of home come not from a building but the emotions evoked through relationships and traditions. As the weather gets colder, driving people inside, and the houses in your neighborhood twinkle with lights, you have a sense that something familiar is coming.

The moment you move out of your childhood home and into an adult life of your own, the concept of home shifts, often for the first time. Parents downsize, divorce, and move out of state, but even if you have a home to return to, it's usually a place you're actively outgrowing. Eventually, you plant roots of your own, and the space you share with your partners and friends becomes more home than any place you lived as a child.

For the first time in human history, we have access to opportunities all over the world. In today's culture, it's not uncommon for young people to move states or even countries away from their families, searching for jobs, education, and new adventures. Our worldliness has led to new kinds of holiday celebrations like Friendsgiving.

Adults who live far away from their families gather together to celebrate as a community—a new form of family.

When those young adults start families, the concept of the family home shifts once more; after all, one of the best part about the holidays is experiencing everything through the eyes of a child. So, naturally, the traditions land in the laps of the young parents. Their households become the hub of the family wheel and allow grandparents to sit back and relax. The child becomes the parent, the parent becomes the grandparent, roles shuffle, and the definition of home transforms once again.

It's incredible to think about how much one family's holiday traditions evolve and change over time. Family evolution is natural, necessary, and has little to do with any house and everything to do with its people. How strangely beautiful it must be to look down at a living room full of grandchildren or great-grandchildren tearing open packages and remember all the versions of the holidays that have existed in your life. From birth to old age, many different places have felt like home. People have come in and out of your life, and others have always been there.

My advice to the younger generation is simple. Take it all in, every moment, every holiday, every emotion. It all changes so fast. Many of you will celebrate fewer than twenty holiday seasons with your children living under your roof, and then they spread their wings and move off to establish their own lives just like you did. Likewise, the traditions you share with your parents and grandparents won't last forever. When you're young, it's hard to imagine a world different from the one that exists right in front of you. But as you age, you realize that everything is changing all the time. If this advice sounds ominous, it's not meant to be. But hopefully, it puts things into perspective.

The world around you is selling a highly decorated and perfected version of the holidays. Each year we're sold the most stylish and up-to-date decorations and encouraged to fight to the death for the last TV on sale at Walmart on Black Friday. But we all know that none of those things hold the magic of the holidays. To truly feel the spirit of the holidays, you have to combat that message focusing on what you know is most important. The memories you carry around from the winters you spent baking with your grandmother or decorating a tree with your children had nothing to do with the appearance of your home. Our memories come from the connections we forge with people we love. When you look back at old holiday memories, the warmth you feel is from togetherness and the yearly break from the hustle and bustle of life— gathering with old familiar faces to retell old stories and make new memories.

Eventually, if we're so lucky, we all become that older generation. Many of you will pass the torch of family traditions to people who come after you to mold and shape into their own. Your children become parents and grandparents, and you'll understand more deeply than ever the true importance of home during the holidays. It's not in the exchanging of gifts or the making of pies. The home we create during the holidays and all year long is a legacy of connection and dependability. It's a landing pad for each generation, a space where they are always welcome no matter the location. Home for the holidays is a commitment to always leaving the porch light on and providing a safe place for the people you love.

Whether you will remain in the home you raised your children in for the rest of your life, plan to downsize, or eventually move into an assisted living facility, you can take pride in the fact that, for some, home for the holidays is wherever you are. The legacy you created will live on for generations.

Adrienne Freeland is a freelance writer who specializes in helping business owners communicate more clearly. Using skills developed in her former career as a professional fundraiser, Adrienne collaborates with her clients to craft engaging, targeted content.