Home for the Holidays; Not the Where, but the Who

Image art: Maybell Eequay

By Taylor Neal

When we think of the holiday season, most often there are associations and feelings that come up which centre around the concept of home. 

Home, traveling home, staying home, decorating our home, going/coming home, traveling to other people’s homes – no matter if we spend the rest of the year at peace with, or perhaps avoiding thoughts of this word and what it brings up, around the holidays it just seems impossible to escape. For many, this is a beautiful thing, a time to reconnect with long lost relatives and find the coziness of nostalgia in childhood houses as we celebrate with loved ones. For many however, this is a challenging reality; an extremely difficult, sticky, messy, confusing site of anticipation and stress, and it must be recognized that this side of things, or wherever one exists in the middle, is an equally valid experience of the holiday season as is the former. Whatever the case may be, some of us simply do not have happy, cozy associations with the word “home,” and that is okay. 

I see you. 

Many of us in the queer community find the concept of “going home for the holidays” utterly terrifying, stressful and exhausting. Though we feel certain obligations toward our biological families, as we flourish into the most full, expansive versions of ourselves, often we grow away from the person our family knew us to be growing up, in the confines of their homes and their structures. Often then, going home means shrinking ourselves to fit into a container which we simply do not fit into anymore, and this act of shrinking is what causes us to leak. Leaking energetically, that is, which can look like arguments or emotional overwhelm in our family homes that end up damaging beyond intent.

In general social formalities surrounding this season, talk of “home” for the holidays falls right up there with regular small talk go-to’s such as “what do you do for a living” or “do you have a partner.” The follow-up to this then usually being “where is home for you?” Whether we travel across seas to make it back to our hometowns for holidays with family, or we stay put and spend the time with our immediate, local community, where seems to be the key question focused on in discussing holiday plans and the concept of home. As it is the one time of year where a large percentage of the world’s population begins to travel to the geographical places with which the word home resonates for them, folks who don’t feel connected to having a “home” in the geographical, traditional sense often come up against feelings of dread and isolation as their communities start to discuss holiday plans. Knowing they will be asked where they’re going or what they’re doing for the holidays in daily conversations in the workplace, social circles and the like, it becomes a task of navigating these chats with as much discretion and as little thought or feeling as possible. One may find themselves trying to figure out how to answer the questions about home and family they know are coming in as little words as possible, in as little detail as possible, without prompting further inquiry in the other person while also satisfying their friendly curiosity.

What is that magic sentence you have crafted for yourself to give as an overarching, generic response to the holiday questions? 

If “home” doesn’t call to mind a big, cozy family gathering place with rosy cheeks and smiling faces dancing around the sugarplums for you, then I want to offer a consideration of how this word, this concept, may feel different if you were to start viewing home less as a place and more as the humans that comprise it. Not the humans that exist within the negative home associations haunting your mind as December starts to roll in, but the humans that exemplify the definition of home that is the home we all yearn for. 

Technically, home is a noun, meaning a person, place or thing. While we have no issue as a society recognizing its existence as a place or a thing, we often forget that home too, can be a person.

In queer communities, the concept of “chosen family” is widely understood and circulated. For generations, since time immemorial, queer people have faced…let’s just say turmoil…in relating to nuclear conceptions of home and family. Their existence deemed invalid, wrong, and far worse, many queer folks, if and when they choose to step into their truth, set out into the world alone with their queerness; their otherness. Rejected from home as both place and person(s) here, home becomes a thing – whatever they can build for themselves, and often it looks quite unconventional to what one may think of as a home. But it is theirs, and it is safe. From here then, as one begins to navigate their place in the world, they may begin to meet and integrate into likeminded communities made up of fellow misfits who are also on a path of re-creating their own concepts of home. While it may take quite a while, in finding likeminded folks who celebrate one another for exactly who they are, in all of their authenticity and all of their bravery, one is able to build and choose their own family with supportive, and most importantly safe, humans who feel more like home than any blood relation ever did. Home here, has nothing to do with where you are but rather, who is there, and even more importantly, how they make you feel. 

The Merriam-Webster dictionary provides these three working definitions of home: the place (such as a house or apartment) where a person lives; a family living together in one building, house, etc; a place where something normally or naturally lives or is located. As we have already dismantled the first two, focused on the actual physical space of the home, I would like to explore the language of the third: a place where something normally or naturally lives. What are the spaces then, and who are the people, in which you can live naturally? Natural relating to the authentic and organic, and “live” as being defined in the same dictionary as to be alive; to continue to be alive; to have a home in a specified place. To live, by definition then, requires a certain amount of safety in order to continue to be alive if we are to think of aliveness as a higher quality of life than simply surviving. Because we deserve a higher quality of life than to simply survive.  Let’s add these components into our working definition for home then:

“A person, place or thing where something naturally continues to be safe and alive.”

If we could think of home as safety, as a safe place in which the fullest, most expansive version of the self is always welcome without condition, and from here start to look at the holidays as an opportunity to build one’s own home while releasing guilt, then home becomes those people in our lives which accept us no matter what form we have taken that day. 

Let’s take this then and apply it to “home for the holidays.” Where now, with who now, do you end up? When you repeat this new definition of home out loud to yourself, who comes to mind? Who brings about safety, naturality, and aliveness for you? If a physical space or geographical location does happen to come to mind here, that’s wonderful, accept it and celebrate that place as a haven and as rightfully yours. But if not, are there humans that can fill this image for you? Can you look to them now within this new, re-worked structure and think, home?

Can we start answering those classic, redundant holiday questions not with a where, but with a who? Can we uplift our chosen family and regard our unique holiday experiences as equally valid and beautiful in our human homes as the experiences of other traveling to return to their cozy hometowns? Can we even go a bit further, and start standing firm in our new views of home, and uplift our pleasure (refer to Pursuing Pleasure during the Holidays article) by refusing to enter those spaces which do not make us feel safe, natural and alive?

Can our relationships, the ones we’ve chosen because they choose us exactly as we are, become our homes for the holidays this year? How does that look? How does that feel? Who is your home? 

Home for the holidays, not the where, but the who.

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