Advent Day 6: Over the River and Through the Woods

“I’ll be Home for Christmas” It’s one of the top five best-selling Christmas songs of all time. The title for this article is also a Christmas song and bespeaks the journey home at Christmas. The list goes on.

At Christmas, we find ourselves drawn to our homes. I have wondered about this. Perhaps it’s because Christmas itself began with a journey home for Mary and Joseph. They were ordered by Quirinius to return to their native city for the census. Both of them being descendants of David, they went to Bethlehem, the City of David, to register. It was here that Jesus was born, to fulfill prophecy.

They travelled home.

This past November 15^th marked twenty years since I left home. I had an unhappy wife who hated the Philadelphia area, where I am from. (She is from Utah) and so we moved to Nashville, TN, where I soon discovered that it was really just me that she hated. My daughter was born there. I had my biggest successes and suffered my greatest losses there. We moved here to Virginia three and a half years ago. Having been homeless for the last six years in TN, this is infinitely better. But it is not home.

Home is flat. Home has a funny accent. Home has Hoagies and Tastykake, and the Iggles. Home has a distinct “attytude” that people not from there don’t easily grasp.

But home has the light display at Wannamaker’s (Lord and Taylor). Home has the Christmas Village, and the lights on Boathouse Row, and Termini brother’s bakery on Christmas Eve, closing up shop and selling sugar plums.

Home is the Claymont Fire Company driving slowly through the neighborhoods one evening just before Christmas, with Santa on the back of the pumper, lights flashing as Santa tosses candy canes to wide-eyed children.

Home is Pierre Robert on WMMR playing Alan Mann’s “Christmas on the Block” and making me cry because I know the backstory to that song.

Home is my grandmother’s old house in Philadelphia, right next to the airport. I don’t know who owns it now, but I drive past it when I’m home at Christmas and I remember my first Christmases there. My Lionel train underneath the tree. My stocking hung on the bannister. (I still have my first-ever Christmas stocking) I remember my grandmother’s dining room and the big table and the leaf-shaped candy dish she kept out with jelly spearmint leaves in it.

Home used to be the monorail that circled the enormous toy department at Wannamaker’s in Center City, my brother, my cousin and I would ride along while our parents shopped below.

Home is the Mummer’s Parade.

Home is “Christmas in the Country” at the first church I ever attended. The annual Christmas play they did for so many years (maybe they still do?) Dave Rambo played the role of the father and his voice was distinctive and when I heard him recite the opening lines, I knew it was Christmas once again.

Home was sharing Christmas with my best friend. Home was Christmas carols on the block where I grew up…in a time when kids were unashamed to walk down their street and sing them.

Home was neighbors dropping by unannounced, but not unexpected. And certainly not unloved.

Home was lying in bed all night, literally all night, unable to sleep, waiting for Santa.

Home was that time during each year when my family called a truce and got along for a few weeks each Christmas. Home was a parade of family and friends on Christmas Eve; each time the door opened it brought a welcomed face, and a fresh breeze of light and happiness blew in with them, replacing –if only for a moment- the stale air of dread that we breathed for the remaining eleven months.

Home is not here. It never has been. In the twenty years I’ve been gone, I have gone home at Christmas all but maybe four of them.

I’ll go home again this year. Daisy is going to Tennessee to see her mom this year, so even this trip home won’t feel as much home as it should.

But it will be home, nonetheless.

No other time during the year calls us home like Christmas does. Home is where the heart is, they say, and my heart has been lost on an open sea for so long now. But each year, my heart finds its way to that safe port. To familiar faces and sights and sounds and smells and traditions.

Those things were supposed to have been here with me by now, but that didn’t come to be. Instead, I’ll journey home once again, as Joseph and Mary did. Not to be counted in a census, but to be counted as family, as beloved, as missed if I didn’t show up.

And until this very moment, writing that last line, I didn’t realize why I go home each year. Home is where your heat is…and where your heart is missed.

Buon Natale