When an unexpected four day weekend was announced, my colleagues immediately booked flights and hotels. Since their recent move into teaching overseas they are following their dream, and traveling the world. So why am I at home, watching the sun go down over the desert from my 12th floor apartment? Why am I not posting from Abu Dhabi, Muscat, or Amman? I considered my options: the price of the flights, the time spent in airport security, the disappointing cheap hotel, and decided not to travel just for the sake of travel. On a teacher's salary and two sons in college, I must do things cheaply, which means, simply, doing things simply.
I have given up sending Christmas cards. I haven't been able to keep up with address changes and unreliable post services over the years. I follow friends on Facebook and so I know exactly where they are for the holidays down to the time their flight takes off. Family will have to wait till I see them in the summer months. I have also given up decorating for the holidays. We now travel during our time off school and spend Christmas in someone else's home. I wonder if guesthouses in Sri Lanka decorate a tree in December?
Not that my house lacks for decorative items. I have altogether too much stuff. It is like I am a tramp, traveling the world, and trying to take all my meaningful trinkets with me, if not in a shopping cart, then in cardboard boxes. A table by the door displays a Brazilian wooden bowl that was a wedding present, a clay fish coaster made for me by a dear friend on the remote island of Kwajalein, and an opera ticket from Sofia, Bulgaria. I like to see them when I enter. They remind me of who I am, where I've been and how I got here. How can I part with the art and keepsakes that now hang on my walls and clutter my shelves?
I find myself in limbo; in a place where I both appreciate my opportunity to travel, and my cultural roots which started me off on this life overseas.
I went to the mall today, in part curious as to how the Muslim country of Kuwait handles a Christian holiday. But I also wanted to find some ingredients to bake traditional treats like mincemeat pies and gingerbread. I think Kuwait finds itself in the same state of limbo, between wanting to embrace all that is beautiful of a foreign holiday without giving up its culture and religion.
The result is that the mall doesn't decorate for Christmas but the stores do. Everyone shops, I found mincemeat, and no one questions the meaning the bed-sheets covered in Grinch motifs.
While out walking the mall, a friend in Brasilia posted this picture. It instantly brought back my earliest memories of Christmas with my family. I remember the lights, the organ music in the church, my parents singing in the choir and fruit cake. I remember going out to play soccer Christmas morning and playing party games into the evening, and lots of food that was not only hard to find in Brasilia, and in fact many of the ingredients had to be sent over from England, but was a labor of love designed to bring together our time overseas with our cultural roots in perfect, and delicious, harmony. PEACE BE WITH YOU, WHEREVER YOU ARE THIS CHRISTMAS!
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