Searching for Home

I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams… Bing Crosby made these lyrics a North American Christmas standard. The song was composed in 1943, imagining a World War II soldier who longed to be home for Christmas. 

But what does it mean to be home for Christmas? Home for me is Halifax. Yet when someone asks me “are you going home for Christmas?” they’re usually asking if I’m going to visit family in Tennessee. The truth is both Nova Scotia and Tennessee are part of my story of home.

Even thinking of Halifax as home is complex. For a lot longer than most of our families have called this land home, it has been known as Kjipuktuk, the Great Harbour. In calling Kjipuktuk home, we acknowledge this is the homeland of our Mi’kmaq neighbours from time immemorial. To be at home here, means to be people of the peace and friendship treaties that date to the 1700s. In recent centuries, we settlers began arriving–some of us might trace ancestry back to early European settler families, others of us are part of the over 400 year history of African Nova Scotian families, some trace family movement to waves of immigration in the nineteenth and twentieth century due to conflicts or famine, some of us are part of the growth in immigration that is shaping our city even now (that would be me and my family), and still others are transient, here as students or for temporary employment. Our varied histories mean we have to work together to understand and honour the different ways Kjipuktuk/Halifax is home and to work to reconcile our stories to make this homeland truly a place of peace and friendship, especially for the original caretakers of this land.

“Where is home?” was also a complex question for the Holy Family. In Luke’s Gospel, home was Nazareth for Mary and Joseph and Jesus was born to them while in a transient place. In Matthew’s Gospel, Nazareth was not home for Mary and Joseph until several years after Jesus’ birth. Bethlehem was their settled home, which means Jesus was born not in a borrowed manger, but in his family’s home. From this place of settlement, they had to flee to Egypt as refugees seeking safety for their young son. Jesus had a complex answer to the question: “where is home?” 

This Advent, we will engage the Christmas story through the lens of home–where is home for the Holy Family? What can we learn from them as they answer that question in different ways?

I’m glad to say I’ll be home for Christmas, right here in Halifax! 

Journeying Together,
Rusty