Home for the holidays. Nostalgia curling around you like steam from a mug, snow-slicked streets, a tree hung with ornaments you once made with glue-sticky fingers, warm cable-knit sweaters, fireside conversations with the people who raised you.
But what happens when home for the holidays no longer means any of those things? Your parents sell your childhood house, your family scatters to opposite corners of the country, and the nostalgia you’ve been carrying sits exactly where it was forged. It lingers in the past—probably a little more ordinary than how it glows in memory.
Before my son was born, we used to slip away at Christmastime. Rather than bruise one side of the family’s feelings, we took the diplomatic route and pleased no one, flying off to Paris, Copenhagen, Napa Valley, London. Always somewhere with more bite in the air than Houston—and bonus points for a Christmas market. But now we have a child who believes Santa needs a consistent address. He likes to wake up in his own house on Christmas morning. He frets that the man in red won’t find him if he strays too far from his familiar tree. So until the inevitable age of cool detachment arrives, we are rooted in Houston for Christmas.
Here, there is no snow. Our coldest days arrive as errant February nightmares, not cloudlike white Christmas mornings. No cable-knit sweaters, either. The fireplace is electric and, mercifully, allows you to switch off the heat. For two adults from Flint, Michigan, it all feels slightly askew.
I grew up with frosted-glass dawns and warm robes shrugged on as early as possible. We would go to sleep with shy flakes drifting down and wake to a world stuffed with cotton-ball snow, ready for snowmen, snowshoeing, and post-lunch family walks. We returned home pink-nosed and glowing, rewarded with hot cocoa crowned with marshmallows.
In Houston, Christmas dawns like any other southern winter day, the air already preparing to warm by afternoon. To wear matching flannel pajamas, we crank up the air conditioning, manufacturing our own chill.
And my heart pulls a little. My Christmas—the one stitched into my memory—is somewhere far north, or across the Atlantic in Denmark, France, or England. Colder places where the season feels exactly as I once imagined it. My son will not have this. He cannot. And as a Michigander at my core, that truth stings.
Of course, there are countless lovely things about our adopted city, but at Christmastime they fade into the background. Nostalgia moves with a force we underestimate until we’re old enough to feel its full weight. Was the holiday magic really that intense? Were all my Christmases white? I can’t say for certain. That’s the enchantment of yearning: it makes the past sparkle brighter than it probably was. Still, the sentiment clings, whether it ever existed exactly as I remember it.
Yet new memories wait to be spun. My son’s Christmas mornings may seem muted compared to the ‘80s and ‘90s reels playing in my mind, but one day he will feel the same way—convinced his own children are missing out on the golden age of his childhood. We always recall things as richer, more meaningful, more shimmering than they were. How can new memories ever win that contest?
I now believe there is something undeniably magical about a Michigan Christmas. Beyond European markets, beyond Eiffel Tower glitter or quiet London streets—something unrepeatable, born of my own hazy lights, my mother zipping me into a snowsuit, the fireplace snapping with pine.
My son will gather his own version. His will feature doors flung open to a soft breeze, playing outside in shirtsleeves, fewer snowflakes but just as much anticipation. He will grumble someday that his children aren’t experiencing the enchantment he once did.
Isn’t that adulthood at Christmas? Fretting that things aren’t special enough, wondering whether we’re doing right by our kids. The worry is probably the surest sign that we are.
Home for Christmas. Maybe not for me. But for my son, this is home—and here is where his memories will take root. And that is reason enough to stay.
