When the fall started at home (and spring started here) instead of stalking my friends’ cute sorority-esque photos at the pumpkin patches, I found myself picturing my moms falls decorations. I had visions of her “Charlie Brown’s Great Pumpkin” decoration and her Martha Stewart style decoupage pumpkin swirling around my head. I miss her ridiculously overdone mantel she would put up on the staircase, that prevented us from sliding down it when we were younger, with fall foliage, orange lights, acorns, ghosts, etc. (whatever was IN that year). I knew that it wouldn’t feel like fall here in Paraguay (well duh, because it wasn’t fall) but I didn’t know I was going to get hit like a sack of bricks over the lack of some orange lights on my staircase (I don’t even have stairs) or the Charlie Brown figurine missing from my countertop (don’t have a counter either….).
I think what I am trying to say is being away from home is hard, but it is made extremely harder by the fact that I know my home is not the same place anymore. The home that I picture no longer has those orange lights hanging on our staircase in October, nor is it dripping with holiday swag all season long. The woman who made our house a home is no longer there, doing any of those things, and thus I am left longing for something that doesn’t even exist anymore. I am home-sick for a home that isn’t even there.
And this was just Halloween. Which lets be real, for the past several years my Halloweens have consisted of me wearing some absurd costume and drinking warm beers in frat basements. And I’m getting all of these feelings just over missing Halloween….
With this in mind, I head into Thanksgiving and Christmas (which I think will be much harder) with a different mindset. Everything is new, everything will be different and everything can be fun, in its own way. I am not going to compare my old holiday traditions with what I am doing now. I heard once from a wise pirate who I met on spring break that “comparison is the thief of joy”. I will not let comparing my previous holidays with my mom to any future holiday rob me of enjoying the moment.
I’m going to have to travel by multiple buses with my puppy to get to my friends site for Thanksgiving where we will (hopefully) be ripping the head off a live turkey, plucking its feathers, and eating it. This is not the same as the Thanksgiving I know where I crawl into my mom’s bed and watch the Macy’s parade while my dad makes his broccoli casserole. This is new, this is something different, this will be fun (and plus the parade isn’t even that good anymore and recently we started DVRing it and fast forwarding through most of it anyway).
I won’t have the Christmas where my mom still pretends the Elves visit our house to leave us pajamas while we’re out at church, and we won’t come down the stairs Christmas morning to a room that looks like “Santa” delivered the entire North Pole over night into our living room. Instead I’ll have a Christmas on a beach with my dad and siblings, (probably with margaritas in hand) and who knows, maybe we’ll see what ludicrous things we can get in to.
Knowing that these traditions that my family has kept alive for years are no longer going to be continued is hard. It’s not that I am just simply missing out on these things while I’m away for two years, it’s that they aren’t even happening anymore. But remember…new, different, fun. Maybe killing our own Thanksgiving dinner is the start of a new Thanksgiving tradition? Or maybe traveling to different exotic locations every year and treating ourselves to something entirely new and exciting is our new way to celebrate Christmas?
Maybe I just need to stop overthinking everything so much and enjoy the simple life that I’m living here. Maybe I need to just stop comparing my life as it is now to my life with my mom in it. Stop comparing apples and oranges.
With all that being said, here’s to the start of a fabulous 2016 holiday season to all my friends and family out there in the world AND here’s a little preview of what I do when I find myself getting too upset or stressed out about things. Enjoy!
AAANNNDD since the whole point of this post was supposed to be about the kick off to the holiday season, here’s some photos from my first holiday in Paraguay, Halloween.The Saturday before Halloween all of the volunteers met in Asuncion for a little musical celebration called ‘Ahendu’ and then back at site I played some holiday themed games at our community center with some of my favorite girls: