Home for the Holidays?

 I have had that song about there being ‘No place like home for the holidays’ stuck in my head recently, I don’t really seem to know the song so I’m really just singing that line over and over again and then it turns into some sort of mumble humming like it does when you don’t know the words. I’m not sure that I even think that home is an essential part of the holidays, family is, I offer as proof the ‘home is where the heart is’ stuff, but when the holidays are over we go back to life as usual and that usual involves home. This year the return to life as ‘usual’ after the holidays is a return to life that is not as usual as it has been for a number of years and this does not come without struggle.

January is never an easy time, it is dark, the days are short, and we are beginning our long wait for spring. Few are really excited to end the holidays and go back to work/school, but this year… this year every weekday is a struggle and each morning is a debate about the merits of school in Masset versus the experiences we are having this year. Each morning I feel as though we are being put on trial, how could we have done this to our children, tore them from the utopia that Masset has become in absentia and placed them into the purgatory that is school in Denmark.

To be sure it is a big ask of kids to pick up and move to another country where they don’t speak the language but I stand by my belief that it is good for them, that they will learn things this year that will make all the hardships worthwhile. Still it gets difficult when each day starts with sad/mad children who want to be at home. Lucky for us moods seem to be better after school and only decline again when it is time to get ready for bed because ‘you have school tomorrow’. But then maybe this is not so unusual at all and only a symptom of the long wait for spring.