Home for the Holidays

There is something so deliciously comforting about being home for the holidays.  I only live about 20 minutes away from my parents, but when Thanksgiving rolls around, I’m like a college kid coming home for Thanksgiving break.  I pack my bag and move back into my childhood home for the next three days.  My sister comes home from Raleigh and for the weekend, our real world jobs and apartments and bills are forgotten as we routinely slip back into childhood bliss.

From the outside looking in, one could speculate that my family really must be just too good to be true.  But it’s not. It is true.  Thanksgiving Wednesday means my sisters and I pile into the kitchen and cook while my mom sings Christmas tunes and my dad whistles as he hovers on the outskirts of the kitchen limits.  The entire downstairs smells of cookies and casseroles and Christmas candles.  After supper, we put on our PJs and snuggle into the bonus room for a holiday movie (my mom’s doings, of course).  Thanksgiving Day is filled with food, lots of family, parades and football and for 24 hours, I think of nothing except the comfort of my home and my family.  Black Friday means scoping the sales and Christmas shopping, usually accompanied by a family lunch at one of our favorite restaurants and Thanksgiving leftovers for dinner.  My friends call and invite me to be social (because Lord knows, Thanksgiving break is when everyone from high school trickles back into town from across the state and gathers for the yearly drunken brawl), but I can’t dig myself out of the blanket of warmth that encircles me when I am home for the holidays.

I realize that there are so many people across America that don’t have the luxury to be with their families over Thanksgiving, or don’t even have the luxury to have a family at all, but I can’t allow myself to be modest when I think of what I have to be thankful for.  I have a family straight out of a Hallmark movie.  I am loved and I am taken care of and for this weekend, that is all I care to think about.  I am home.