Another Christmas

I can feel another Christmas coming, with quick steps full of joy and jingle... I can see it approaching in the decorations that appear everywhere like flowers in the spring sun... I can feel it coming, and my soul lifts in joy... I remember the Christmases that passed, sweet days of my far away childhood, and I smile when the smells of another world surround me. The sweet, fresh smell of a real pine tree on a cold winter night, my mother's cooking, a symphony of flavour... I can hear the simple, uncomplicated laughter of the children we once were... The adult in me smiles and looks forward to recreating the magic...

With my children, I take out of a neat box the big, green pine tree we use every year and I long for the perfume of a real one, with little green needles pricking my fingers... Out of more boxes, we take out the new decorations we had just bought to make some imaginary colour scheme and from the iPod dock, carols in a language that sings not to my soul spill into the room combined with my children's laughter... Hanging the decorations in the tree, plastic globes instead of the fragile glass ones of my childhood, however, is it so similar that if I close my eyes, I can hear my parents and my siblings in those far away years...

With the tree decorated, taking advantage of the long daylight of the Australian summer, my children go off to play outside, and left home alone, I change the playlist on the iPod to another, still carols, but in a language that comes from my blood and I sit there, on the floor, looking at the blinking lights in the tree, and at fist I smile... For few seconds, I can keep up the illusion of being home...

I look out of the window at the colourful birds playing on my flowering balcony and further still at the green bush and the deep blue sky of summer and the sweet illusion shatters leaving me frozen... I am not home... There is no winter night with snowflakes falling in a mad ballet from the sky, there is no boiled wine with sugar and spices, no fire roaring wildly under terracotta tiles... No children singing carols at the gate... No family...

The longing squeezes my heart painfully, so painfully I can hardly even breathe and a sad, lonely tear falls on my cheek... With quick, pounding steps, guilt follows longing... Locked in a world on the other side of the planet, I am depriving my parents of having their only grandchildren around the Christmas tree, I am depriving my siblings of having their nieces... I am depriving my children of their family and their traditions... Guilt hammers at my heart and it melts again in longing...

I have friends... On Christmas Eve I shall have countless presents under the tree, a house full of friends and a table full of those dishes that on the other side of the planet my mother would be cooking... Same perfumes, same flavours, same laughter floating around my house... But I wont have my parents and my siblings... I wont have children singing carols at the door and snow falling in front of my windows...

In my blood, I will feel the bitter cold of a winter's night and the painful wind that calls me from afar... In my heart I will feel the longing for my singing language...

I sit there on the floor, watching our blinking tree, listening to the carols of my land, and the tears start falling down my face, a bitter river of regret and longing...

Will I ever get used to a Christmas in summer? Will I ever get used to Christmas without my parents and my siblings? Without my language flowing around the table? One would think so. I have spent a third of my life in Australia now... It is home now, this country I had made my own... But at Christmas, my blood calls and my heart longs for... my own...