On the 6th day of Christmas

"The secret is to make sure your family comes before anything else, because no matter what you do you’ve got to come home." - Barry Gibb

This year marks 20 years since my last Christmas at home with my family. Christms has always been somewhat of a challenge or me, as anyone who moves away from home may know. All those years of gigging and signing "I'll be home for Christmas" knowing it was not going to happen, always seemed a little sad. I was away from my family and my traditions feeling like a woman without a home. Then I met Marc who loves, loves, loves Christmas.

In this new life, we have made our own traditions founded on our similar cultural history. In the process we have adapted for the reality of sharing our kids with their other parent and trying to create moments of happiness around the celebration of Christmas. Marc and I have often remarked how lucky we are that our kids get along. Having a reconstituted family can be such a challenge. For us the biggest challenge is to be together everyone. It happens once a year at Christmas time. This year it fell on December 29th at our house. We have our traditions. We all get stocking gifts to share and we open them one at a time, starting from the youngest to the oldest. There is a lot of laughter. As we go around the room, we take turns opening our gifts and discovering who the Santa is. I know looking for that perfect gift on a relatively small budget, is part of the challenge. We have a lot of humour and that tells me we also have a lot of love. It is not an obvious thing this new family: the kids didn't choose us and they didn't choose each other. We know this. Yet they get along; they are each their own person and have their own style with a common thread of artist in each one of them. They are kind, caring and loving and for this, we are very grateful. 

Here's hoping each Holiday season brings families of all kinds together to share in the Joy and Love, just because. Merry Christmas.

Namaste,

Bianca

 

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