Home for Christmas

Katie D.

December 26, 2008 - 1:55 PM

Life at home can become somewhat discombobulated. It's my third year at the University of Oregon, and I've made Eugene my home. The people who know me best, the places I visit most, my whole routine is there now. So coming home for Christmas is wonderful: I get to see my family and old friends, I get to see the Rocky Mountains, and I get to take some time off. But things are also strange, like time has stopped running as planned and the normal cast of characters has been left behind. And the old cast has changed as well: new interests, new faces, old friends gone off to one corner of the world or another.

Christmas in Colorado. Something I have experienced now twenty times. The Rockies are so beautiful in the winter, and there's almost always some snow on the ground. We always spend Christmas day with my Dad's sister and her family. On Christmas Eve my sister and I open our traditional Christmas Eve pajamas and we drive around to see the over-the-top, conspicuous consumption Christmas decorations. We go to an evening church service, just my sister and parents and me. We drink hot chocolate and play cards. Christmas morning we do presents and then head over to the cousins' house. When we were younger it was a time of playing together, the kids in the basement while the adults talked upstairs. This year we all hung together: grown-up kids talking about grown-up things. One cousin is graduated: off to start "real life" as an engineer. The younger cousin told stories of college life in Wyoming, which is just a little different than my own experience. And my little sister is looking at a final year of high school. Seems we've outgrown our old traditions of air hockey and nighttime flashlight tag on the golf course.

I, as always, was a bit of the strange one. The Traveler, the Activist. When I mentioned a trip to Mexico planned for this spring break, the relatives immediately started in with the "Oh man, party in Mexico, spring break the right way!" and there was collective confusion when I restated my plans: a trip to the Arizona/Mexico border to work with a humanitarian aid group in the desert.

The family is awfully kind about my oddities. But it is oh-so plain that they are oddities.

It has also become very strange to return home to my Colorado friends. We've spread out across the country, as college students are prone to do. Some friends are out East, some stayed around here. I still get together with my friends from my middle school days: I went to a small charter school with 50 students graduating eighth grade. We were close then, and some of us are still close now. But it is strange to get together. One of us is married. Some, like me, have made drastic changes in personality over the last six years. Others have hardly changed, which is even stranger. It's like that for all my friends: some have become people I hardly know but still love, others have become too hard to deal with, and others are just as good of friends as they have ever been. I suppose that's growing up.

This year I've also had a hard time with the word "home." As in "it's nice to be home," one moment, and then "when I'm back home in Oregon" the next. It's a bit like multiple personality disorder: all these people here, still believing most strongly in the child and young adult I was, and then my Oregon self with all my dreams and achievements that often, by Colorado suburban standards, are outlandish and a trifle threatening. The Katie that used to live here was a band kid, an honors student, with no political sentiment and, while not shy, was deeply invested in other people's opinions of her.

The intervening years combined with my circumstances in Oregon and abroad have changed me greatly. The self I embraced when I first arrived on campus was a Katie with fewer needs from others and higher expectations of herself. I dropped band for a semester to see if I would miss it, and while I do miss band and being a part of music, I have loved the freedom it has allowed me. I became more than just vaguely interested in politics and social justice: I have made it a focus of study, activities, and thought. I say what I think and that's fine with the people I have met in Oregon. When I tell my Oregon friends about plans to spend spring break volunteering with a humanitarian organization, some volunteer to come with me.

I don't mean to cast my Colorado friends and relatives in a bad light. These are people who I grew up with: adults who raised me, and friends who shaped my childhood. These are also people who have loved me for years and years, and people I love to come home to.

But when you leave the state to go to school, you leave a lot behind. I didn't know a single person in the whole state when I first arrived on the Oregon campus. No one knew or cared about childhood traumas and triumphs. My middle school status as uber-nerd was not damaging in Oregon. No one knew about the couple of high school years when I was so deeply lonely. No one even had to know about the good things: about the senior year marching band season when I had a solo and we took second place in state, about the honor roll, about my friends in my church or how much I love my mountains. In Oregon I was only the person I presented. No one gets to start over, not really. We carry with us everything that has been, and everything that has ever happened. But I had the opportunity to choose for myself how I wanted to appear in the world I was entering. Turns out I'm not so very different, and I haven't bothered to keep secrets. The difference is not in what is known about me, it is in the expectation. My Oregon friends have only seen the Self with supreme confidence, one prepared to take on the world. My Colorado friends remember flubbed solos, awkward high school romances, and a little girl who fell out of trees.

It's always good to go home. It's good to be back in my home, walking in my old neighborhood. It's good to try out some college stories on my relatives and see what they have to say. My immediate family hears my stories in small doses, and are always incredibly supportive. But it's fun to drop bombs like spear making and prison activism on my conservative aunt and uncle. Especially since they so obviously love me anyway.

And always it is a miracle and a privilege to be with my grandmother, who will be turning ninety years old in 2009. She has seen more of this country's history than I can truly imagine: she remembers the Depression and World War II. She writes books and does oil paintings. She still lives in the house where my father grew up, all alone since my grandfather died fifteen years ago. She is a good deal of what is most important to home for me: a strong woman who has always believed I would go into the world and do great things.

Well, here I am in Littleton, in my room full of high school knickknacks and bad beginner's poetry. Here I am with all my hopes ahead of me and all my achievements behind me, and the present here, in my childhood home. And I remember how I was here, and what it is I have gained in my transition, and all the history behind me.

Home for Christmas.