Homesick Blues

This time of year is always hard to be an American expat.  True to the old adage "You don't know what you have until you don't have it anymore" - I did not have any idea how much of a hole it would create in my life to not be surrounded by all that goes along with this time of year.  I'd always rejected so much of it: the high fructose corn syrup sugar mania of Halloween, the revisionist history of Thanksgiving, the gross consumerism of Christmas.  I still reject those things.  But the energy, sentiment, tastes, smells, images, and rhythms are held deep within me.  We do our best to create our own expat version of what holds meaning for us. But in many ways  it reinforces the isolation and differentness of being a stranger in a strange land when our house is the only place where we can encounter so much of these.  We do our best to share traditions and celebrations with friends here by inviting them to join us for celebrations and meals, and without them carrying their own expectations we are free to do it up exactly as we see fit, often in quite unorthodox wasy. (Our first Thanksgiving comes to mind...while in the UK we celebrated "Thank God the Puritans Left Day" )    Yet it comes up short and I am left longing. 
 
I love our expat life and would not trade it for another, but sometimes there is no place like home.