Christmas Nostalgia - - A Nomad's Perspective

Nostalgia. By the very definition, this strange feeling is something often lacking in the nomadic life. Nostalgia is the “returning home.” It is the state of mind of going back to how things once were by an experience of our senses. 

We can breathe in forgotten histories, living for a moment as it were years ago. Our eyes can behold the neighborhood we once navigated as youngsters and then glimpse a silhouette of our former childhood selves.

For a nomad, however, those histories were never attached to a single locale for very long. We may remember a time in our past that brings precious memories, but it isn’t a string of memories woven around a particular edifice etched in time, but a snapshot of our sojourning lives. A postcard of a life lived, a time past, an event commemorated.

A nomad’s home is tent rather than a cathedral. It’s built in a day and torn down faster. Nevertheless, wherever she is staying in the present becomes her home. And with that is etched into the timeline of the cosmos to become her point of nostalgia in the future. Since that home changes with the seasons, so, too, does the feeling of nostalgia bring her to not to a single place in history but to various homes known to her throughout her life.

Nostalgia works differently for nomads. They “return home” to a vast array of places across the globe, across the country, around the district. 

Just like the burning of a bonfire might bring the average person back to the days snuggled under the huge arm of their father as the Christmas Eve bonfire raged, so, too, might a waft of smoke bring a nomad back to walking the streets of Uganda where household trash smoldered off to the side. Or the sound of kids splashing in a puddle may remind the average person of hapless youths clogging about the streets whereas the same sound might bring a nomad back to the Amazon where an evening of rainfall left the village half-flooded.

Growing up, we moved around a lot and so we had many homes with each their own aspects of nostalgia. Apples or the stretched lights of traffic lights in the middle of the night bring me back to my earliest home. Baseball, legos, Where’s Waldo brings me back to another home. The smells of the forest brings me to another.

Now, I have two homes: Ethiopia and North Carolina. A complexity emerges for any holiday seeing how such festivities are shared with family in your home. For me, I’m always in a torn state of having a part of my home or family 7,000 miles away. Sometimes I celebrate holidays twice, or once, or not at all. Perfect schedules are funny things that have always eluded my family, but we make it work.

Growing up, we used to open one present on Christmas Eve which was a new movie for each of us. We’d watch it in our rooms (we didn’t always have a television in our rooms, so hauling a spare in was another aspect of our special tradition). We’d stay up all night while our parents finished wrapping presents and getting the house ready for Christmas morning. That tradition sort of died as we grew older, though this year I noticed it was something missing to several of my siblings. 

This year, I chose to celebrate Christmas in Ethiopia after having been in the States for three months. It wasn’t the same, nor do I think it will ever be the same. And for that, I have to simply readjust what I view the holidays as. And THAT is the crux of this entry. Living a nomadic life means you have to constantly amend your expectations for what life is.

Nostalgia brings us back to where we once were. But life isn’t in the nostalgia, but in the now.

I think we put too much on Christmas. We want it to be perfect. We want everyone to be there and for everyone to have a good time. We want to have the candy canes, the hot chocolate, the tinsel hanging from the lit Christmas tree, the fog on the window panes that blur the neighborhood decorations of light, the humming of the radio playing Christmas music interrupted by the scraping of the rod stoking the logs of the fireplace back to fiery life.

Christmas means cold weather, warm fireplaces, bonfires at least once during the winter with friends and family, sweaters and hoodies, cozy socks, hot cocoa, Christmas trees, carols playing on the radio, shopping. It means traditions and doing certain things you hardly ever did during the year.

Christmas in Ethiopia isn’t the same as Christmas in North Carolina. For one thing, Christmas isn’t celebrated on December 25th, but rather January 7th or 8th. North Carolina winters are often times gross with ice and sleet, but it is still cold. Ethiopian Christmas is celebrated in 80 degree weather. That means no hoodies, no bonfires, no cozy socks. 

Because no one else was celebrating Christmas it was hard to get into the Christmas spirit. Christmas was on a Wednesday, but school was still in session. So I couldn’t celebrate with my kid on the actual holiday. There was no special feeling in the air because it was just another day.

When everyone else is celebrating Christmas in January, it will still be hard for me to get into the Christmas spirit because it won’t be Christmas--it’ll be a week into the New Year. It’ll be weird. I’ll be the one who sees the day as just any other day, missing out on that community spirit.

But the life I am living now, the home I have now, will one day become the retro-point of my nostalgia. Therefore, how do I want to experience that “returning home”? Do I want to recall the stressful holidays of trying to make it perfect? Do I want to return to the feelings of not having everything that makes up a memorable Christmas?

Celebrating Christmas around the world is different. It certainly is something that will bring nostalgia years from now as you remember a different smoke, or a different spice aroma, or a different weather temperature. It’ll be different. There will be different customs and festivities. There will be a different spirit. But it can still be Christmas if you let it.

Christmas takes on various differing aspects as you travel the world. Just like a bonfire might bring us back to our childhood, which in turn may bring us back several generations of people celebrating the same way during the winter months, so, too, can several other rituals connect people with their ancestors from all over the world.

 The holidays are rituals--artifacts of histories and heritages. Nostalgia brings us back to our roots, breathing in the aromas of our childhood, hearing the sounds of our ancestors, seeing the same sights our forefathers and foremothers saw.

Nostalgia for a nomad plays a different role. The nomadic experience is shared across many cultures, many countries, many homes. Our roots are networked across a great span of geography. Our ancestors shared in many experiences with the ancestors of other people, stepping through a unique portal into a foreign nostalgia. 

Holidays go beyond a confined shared community of memories and erupts into a dance where new steps are learned along the way. The melody shifts, and the rhythm of life staggers, but we can find the choreography of humanity to bring us into perfect syncopation. 

I have friends who celebrate Kwanzaa. Other friends celebrate Hanukkah. Some celebrate Christmas with a heavy religious overtone while others embrace the fantasy of Santa Klaus as welcomed getaway from the day-to-day seriousness of life. Every family celebrates the holidays differently. Every country celebrates different holidays. But everyone cherishes their festivities as it connects their generation with the generations that went before them in a beautiful thing called nostalgia.

As a nomad, one can plunge into the festivities humanity has to offer. 

There is a nostalgia in returning to the nucleus of what it means to be human.

Humanity is diverse, expansive, and unique. Yet we each share the same aspects in our core that defines who we are. We express those aspects in various ways, but they boil down to the same. 

We can experience a shared nostalgia. We can hear the sounds of the ancestors of our new friends. We can smell the aromas that waft through the winds of time. We can find ourselves surrounded by a host of ancestors who shared a human experience generations ago, even though our own ancestors were not present.

I don’t have a perfect life. I get so tunnel-visioned I forget to see my experiences as a choreographed dance. I get bogged down in the details that I forget I’m making, now, the home I will be nostalgic for in days to come.

With the beat of the drum, with the swaying of the people, with the ebb and flow of melodies and harmonies, I can breathe in a nostalgia for humanity across the globe. Americans live differently than Ethiopians, but they all are humans dancing through life in a wildly exotic grapple trying to discover what it means to be human.

I am a wannabe nomad, and this is my story. This is my dance.

-Kevin the Nomad