Home To You (This Christmas) - Sigrid
Sigrid originally wrote this without any Christmas references, but said that “it’s about my hometown and the house I grew up in with my family. I always go back for Christmas, so it felt natural to make a Christmas version.” She’s made also made a lovely little website to accompany this version:
Home To You is a love letter to my hometown. After so much time apart from the places we love the last couple of years, I want to celebrate the places that mean home to you. Tell me where home is for you at Christmas time and have your city featured on the map.
At the time of this writing, the map allows you to click through "3104 meanings of home shared", snippets like "Åsgårdstrand: a place where i can go to gather my thougts", "Hong kong: everything" and "Enschede: my roommates".
I feel quite fortunate to have a hometown, especially one that I enjoy returning to every December. I feel a sort of belonging in Toronto's streets, recognizing and being recognized by shopkeepers who knew me as a child. Of course, fewer of them know me nowadays; old Mr. Gwartzman, who for over a decade smiled and sold me discounted art supplies that I'd use to paint presents for my relatives, is no longer minding the counter. I’ve been gone a while.
A few months ago, a friendly person I'd just met asked me: "so, how old were you when you left Canada?"
An unexpected question, carrying the assumption that I’ve left, past tense. The first time I remember leaving Canada was when I was nine, an Unaccompanied Minor going to visit my Nana in Wales, which I no longer believed was a pod of coastal whales she cohabitated with. The first time I lived outside of Canada was when I was twenty, on an exchange semester in Chile, appreciating that termodinámica sounds almost the same in Spanish and English.
And now, well, the question was asked because I've lived in Canada for less than 18 months in the last 5 years. Perhaps in part because so many of those years were spent in the USA, I feel very defensive about my Canadian identity. Home is still Toronto, in a way.
In other ways, I don't have a home right now. Hearing that I expect to be in California for a few months early next year, a friend asked, “Are you a digital nomad at this point?”. I responded, "Not... dispositionally?"
But perhaps she protests too much; there was only one month this year (glorious May!) that I spent entirely in a single country. It has been an enormous privilege to travel so much this year, largely for work, and it has taught me that I am not particularly well-suited for a productive life lived out of backpacks and hotel rooms.
All this mobility has changed me, sometimes for the better, but it exists in tension with the parts of me that want to be supporting a community and building a home. I feel like this song reflects some similar tensions:
But if I need you to remind me
That nothing has changed
Would it be okay, would it be okay if I came home to you?
A more complicated feeling than simply promising to be home for Christmas.
Wishing you a cozy sense of belonging,
Whether you’re travelling or staying in place,
Tessa