TORONTO, Canada, December 24, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) ― When a Scottish man asked me to marry me, I said yes, but with one condition.
“I want to go home to Toronto for Christmas every year,” I explained.
Mark agreed cheerfully, and then we spent every Christmas thereafter in Europe.
This was usually because we didn’t have the money to travel across the Atlantic at Christmas time. We could always manage an annual round-trip fare between Glasgow and Toronto for one person – me – when it was cheapest. This meant November or February, and I always picked February, when I was most likely to see snow. But Christmas-week fares for one person, let alone two, are just nuts, starting at approximately $1,170 USD on the most economical airline.
Then, when we did have enough money, Mark was recovering from brain surgery, in no shape to cross the Atlantic by air. And then the next year he was still dizzy from radiotherapy, so ditto. In desperation I researched Atlantic crossings by boat. They’re rare, time-consuming, expensive, and apparently viewed as a holiday in themselves. After the ship reaches New York, European passengers fly home. This strikes me as wasteful. There may be a demand for rapid Atlantic ferries, entrepreneurs, and not just by Greta Thunberg.
I coped with disappointment the old fashioned way: with food. When we were first married, I collected my mother’s Christmas recipes and made them all every year: the cookies, the buns, the cake, the trifle, the soup, the curried carrots, the green-beans-with-almonds-and-sweet-peppers, the turkey. This was a lot of food for two people, and I vied with other childless households in our parish for the most amiable of the potential Christmas guests. Concerned when a Polish student elected to spend Christmas in Edinburgh instead of going with his family to the U.S., I made Polish Christmas Eve supper, too: all 12 dishes. I just could not believe anyone could survive Christmas away from home without the comfort of traditions.
We weren’t always without family. Some years, up to four of my relatives took the expensive flight over the ocean to be with us. One year they brought the Canadian weather with them, and this stands out in my memory as my favorite Scottish Christmas. At the time we lived in the attic of a big house in a park, and my brother and sister helped Mark and me drag a Christmas tree home from the neighboring garden center through the snow.
Sadly we had to leave that house last year, which made my bouts of Christmas baking more wistful and nostalgic than ever. Late one night after work, while I was preparing food to the sound of Christmas songs, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” began to play. When the singer reflected that he might be home for the holiday only in his dreams, I burst into tears.
I think this is what is known as a “first world problem,” but homesickness itself is universal.
The biggest emotional issue, when you marry a foreigner and leave home to live in his country, is that you leave half your heart behind with your family and friends. But when you leave your spouse behind to visit your family and friends, the other half of your heart is left with him. What you want, more than anything else, is to have the two halves of your heart joined together.
That’s what I’ve wanted for Christmas since 2009, and this year I’ll get it. I arrived in Toronto on December 5, Mark arrived on December 21, and on Christmas Day all of my brothers and sisters and their children will join us and my parents in our parents’ house. I’m as happy as a child expecting Santa Claus because I’m an adult expecting her whole family joined together for one glorious golden day.
I hope you and your families are as happy as we will be this week. Merry Christmas!