happy christmahannukwanzikaa everyone.  people lately have been asking me how i can travel during the holidays?  don’t i miss my family?  what about all the fun christmas parties?  and the christmas feasts?  what do they eat where you are?  do they even celebrate christmas?  what do they call santa claus?  don’t you miss the presents?

it’s weird for me sometimes, and difficult to explain.  it’s not that i don’t miss all these things, and it’s not that i don’t care about them.  and i would be lying if i said i didn’t want a christmas feast tomorrow, especially after traveling abroad for the last 4 months and missing our other american celebration of gorging yourself, thanksgiving.   god i miss pumpkin pie.  i miss sweet potatoes.  and roasted turkey and cranberry sauce.  and gravy.  oh god, gravy.

but there are certain trade-offs you accept when you decide to leave on an extended trip, especially one during the world’s most sacred of times of the year.  the trade-offs vary for each person, and they can be both insignificant and meaningful, depending on the person and their situation in life.  for me, it’s a bit of both.

for the insignificant, it’s the simple things.  the desire to do something different, the need to use up vacation hours before they expire at the new year, the wish to escape the in-laws.  or the unruly children of relatives.  these are all easy things to think of that push somebody over the pond to the great wide open.

but then there’s the meaningful the things.  the obvious and most glaring trade-off is the search for the new.  the hope and the dream that something exciting and different is waiting beyond the next horizon, that new incredible experiences lay like buried treasure, waiting to be discovered, and that a whole new world might unfold before your very eyes, unlocking the truths of the universe.  or at least the meaning of your own life.  this indeed is the allure of travel in general, but making these decisions is more difficult during the holidays, so the wandering soul is tested with a decision that weighs harder than it normally might, and must prove just how badly the desire to explore truly is.

for others, maybe they run away from things.  maybe they don’t have a family, or maybe their family is broken.  no judgment here, i’d say there are minor elements of both those things at play within my own trip.  or maybe they just want to see how they decorate the eiffel tower at christmas.  whatever the reason, it’s not really the business of anyone else.  if the reason is meaningful enough to you, you do it and don’t look back.

but then there is inevitably a moment or two that you feel the weight on other end of that decision, and you might wish you were home instead of wherever it is that you are.  it’s never the big moments that come back to you, it’s always the little ones.  like watching home alone with your siblings like you’ve done almost every year since you were a kid and laughing inexplicably hard at the moment when kevin is walking home from the grocery store and the bags break, dropping all his items onto the sidewalk.  you’ve seen it a million times, but for some reason just now its the funniest thing ever. or decorating that damn tree & finding that one hideous ornament that somebody gave you one year when you were 9 that always gave you the creeps, but now after all these years you just look at it and smirk.  or having a glass of wine (or three) and sitting back and watching the complete chaos of your large extended family losing its mind between the food, the conversation, the presents, everything.  and the sheer exhaustion that eventually descends on you  after about 30 minutes of enduring this.

but it’s these things that really don’t mean anything that suddenly mean everything when you put them all together and see that these are the things that make up the whole picture of your life.  like standing up close to a van gogh and seeing all the dots, not really sure what you’re looking at.  but then you take a few steps back and see the greater beauty. and just when you’re starting to wonder whether or not you made the correct decision to leave what you know during the most valued time of the year for a land far away where you don’t speak the language and you don’t recognize anything they’re eating, you realize that this trip is not a mistake, nor is it even a trade-off.  it is merely another dot (or ten) on the canvas.  and hopefully, as you walk the foreign streets of whatever far-off land you might be in, you can enjoy the moment you are currently in without any pause or hesitation or confusion that you might not be where you’re supposed to be.  instead, you can take some small pleasure that you are indeed experiencing everything you had hoped to on your trip, and next year, just maybe, you’ll have an even deeper and more intense appreciation for all those little things that you never noticed before.

happy holidays to anyone in the cosmos that stumbles upon this blog, and hopefully something resonates with you.  if it does, i raise my glass (of woodford reserve) to you as i sit here on the couch in a cheap airbnb apartment in croatia, watching a likely illegal version of home alone on an ipad.   trust me, wherever you are right now, you’re where you’re supposed to be.

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sorry folks, i don’t do christmas music.  i’ve been told for years that makes me a scrooge, and so be it. but nevertheless, i’ve got a harmless easygoing jam for you today on the day before christmas (some of you may need it once you get surrounded by your families and the political convos start flying around).  the topic of the blog today was about all those little things you can get nostalgic about, and this song is completely rooted in it.  anybody too young will likely not have quite the appreciation for this, but the opening notes of this song kick-started my time machine to back in the day (i’ve always driven old cars.  i don’t believe in buying new) and just builds and builds.  it takes something that used to cause me to pull my hair out and transforms it into an infectious, head nodding gem that i never saw coming.   enjoy…

and the playlist on spotify…