Doug's 2025 Christmas Greeting

“The Longing for Home"

"A house is made with walls and beams; a home is built with love and dreams."
 
            ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson


Some sixteen years ago I wrote about the longing for home, especially during Christmas. It was never published in this forum and I would like to revisit that article perhaps adding a few new thoughts. Maya Angelou wrote, “The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” If proof that Ralph Waldo Emerson and Maya Angelou knew something about “home”, the endless number of song titles that reflect on the longing for home, the love and warmth of family, memories and nostalgia, then that would be all the proof needed about that “home” feeling which lingers in our minds and hearts.

We know them all, “Take Me Home, Country Roads”, “Back Home Again”, “Homeward Bound”, “500 Miles Away From Home”, “The Green, Green Grass of Home” and “Don't It Make You Want to Go Home”. They’re reminiscent of a feeling of comfort, belonging and peace. However, Christmas has its own brand of seasonal favourites praising home like “Driving Home For Christmas”, “(There's No Place Like) Home for the Holidays” and probably the most iconic, “I'll be Home For Christmas” first recorded by Bing Crosby with the John Scott Trotter Orchestra. The year was 1943 and the song hit the airwaves at a time when it was most needed. It was a time when families and soldiers were separated in the depths of World War II and its lyrics reaching the hearts and souls of those fighting resounded the heartbreak and loneliness of being so far away and echoing the most memorable line, “I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams.”

More than eighty years later, “I’ll be Home for Christmas” still resonates with generation after generation. Even today it is more than war that separates family. This is a day and age that finds families spread out over cities and countries. They say the world gets smaller with our technology but somehow at Christmas - never small enough for those who are wishing to be home for Christmas.

Memories of a home filled with family, grandparents, neighbours stopping in are treasured. The excitement of children inflicted with a kind of insomnia that can only be caused by the expectation of Dear St. Nick! Memories of cold winter Christmas Eves contrasted by the warmth and inviting interior of a church for midnight service celebrating the birth of our Saviour, the reminiscing of childhood memories like rising too early Christmas morning when it was still so dark and yet peaking into the living room, noticing the tree and how its icicles would dance from the forced air of the oil furnace and glittered from the white street light shining in the window, and if lucky, you may have noticed silhouettes and shadows cast by Santa's very recent delivery, and, what about those comforting memories of the kitchen filled with the aroma of a home cooked Christmas turkey dinner? Precious memories of Christmases past, warmhearted and sentimental take us back so vividly as if time stopped for just a while. This Christmas of 2025 will continue to entrust us with new traditions and create new memories.

As the years pass, we may not be able to go home the way we always did - things do change. For family members who have gone before us, we treasurer their legacies and memories. Christmas has a very unique way of blending the past with those warm memories, and the present with people we love. It also has a way of putting a little something away for the future - new experiences, traditions, which will be forever preserved in treasured memories in Christmases to come, when and somehow finding those again who are wishing to be home for Christmas.

On behalf of my wife Josey, we both wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas. We hope you will find peace and happiness, contentment and love no matter where and no matter how Christmas finds you. Let it find you, or go out and find it - the comfort and pleasure of family, friends, memories and traditions. We hope all these will be yours to embrace in 2026! Happy New Year!

If you would like to view and listen to this original message intended for family, friends and clients in 2009, please click, Home for Christmas 2009!