Sonya Bateson: Christmas is a time to cherish family and home

This Christmas, treasure the people you hold dear, whether they are family by blood or family by choice, writes Sonya Bateson. Photo / Getty Images

OPINION

Christmas is a time of love.

It is a time of giving. A time of hope, happiness, and celebration.

Christmas is a time of home and a time of family.

It’s those last two words that have me thinking today.

They’re both words with straightforward definitions, but are packed with nuance: The ways in which we define our home and our family are as individual as we are.

Take home for example. What, exactly, is a home? Is it your current address? Is it the place you were born, or the place you grew up? Where you raised your family? Is it where you picked the wall colour, planted the gardens, selected the drapery, hung the photographs? Where you spent the largest portion of your life? Your favourite spot?

It could be all of these, or none. I reckon a big part of that nuance is because of how transient our lives have become in the 21st century. Our roots are not as firmly planted as past generations.

We may grow up in one place, study somewhere else, move to another city for work, find yet another place with good childcare and schools nearby to raise our children in, then pick a sunny town with good facilities to retire to. We could end up anywhere given the time, money and inclination.

Take my life for example. I only began putting down roots in the last six years or so in the place I now call home.

Most of my early adult years were spent flitting from town to town and flat to flat as I studied, worked, studied again, graduated, worked, changed jobs, and changed jobs again.

From ages 18 to 25 I moved roughly every six months, chasing opportunities and carting my books, clothes and furniture with me everywhere. I became an expert dismantler with an impressive collection of allen keys.

During that time, I lost all sense of home. My parents had moved on from my childhood home, my siblings had begun to leave the nest, my closest friends had moved to different towns. Everything was changing and my life was in constant flux. I had a place to live but I had no true home.

Then I got a good job and a place of my own. I had stability. Those long-neglected roots began to unfurl.

I made friends and found ways to fill my hours. Those roots found fertile soil.

I found fulfilment and enjoyment in my career. The roots grew.

I met someone and realised I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him. Those roots burrowed down and clung on tight.

We had a baby and bought our first house. Those roots are now firmly entrenched in a new home soil – not the one I was born and raised in, but a place all of my own choosing, with the people I hold most dear.

My home, and my family.

My story is not unusual in this day and age. In fact, I’d go as far as calling it common experience.

How many people reading my words today are living in the place they were born?

About 27 per cent of New Zealand’s population at the last Census were born overseas, and if you factor in the number of people who have moved to the Bay from elsewhere in the country, I’d feel comfortable betting that at least half of us moved here from somewhere else.

Not so long ago, it was the norm for children to grow up, marry and raise their own children all within the same neighbourhood they, their parents and their parents grew up in.

Family members would help each other out. Children would often follow their parents’ trade and take over the family business. Grandparents, aunties and uncles would help raising the smaller children. Elderly relatives would be nursed by their offspring until their turn came to reside alongside their own parents and grandparents.

But this style of generational living is becoming less common as we – literally – move further and further apart from our relatives and our places of birth. We are forming ever-evolving styles of support networks that are completely changing the way we view home and family.

So then, back to my original question – what is a home? What is a family?

I think the answer to that is as individual as you and me, and yet can be boiled down to one thing – love.

Familial love, romantic love, fraternal love. Love of any and every description. Love makes the family, and family makes the home.

This Christmas, treasure the people you hold dear, whether they are family by blood or family by choice.

The people we love, the people we choose to spend our time with, the people we admire, honour, trust and care for – those people are our families. Those people are our home.

Sonya Bateson is a writer, reader, and crafter raising her family in Tauranga. She is a Millennial who enjoys eating avocado on toast, drinking lattes and defying stereotypes. As a sceptic, she reserves the right to change her mind when presented with new evidence.