christmas

I think a house is different from a home. I don't think any house is a home until the people inside it make it a home. A home is a place where you belong, something that you can always return to and will wrap you in its warm arms after a long day, somewhere you can feel safe and loved.  I think people can be homes. When I believe my house is a home, it is holidays when my house is filled with homes. Christmas is a perfect example of this. My house is filled with the fresh scent of pine needles as they litter the hardwood floor and get stuck to our feet carrying them through the house. The warm air from the fireplace carries the scent of the ginger snap cookies wrapped in sugar my mother made well we were decorating the tree. Shaping the dough into balls dropping them carefully in a bowl of crunchy glass sugar, rolling them around so they look like snowballs. They have been passed through generations of my family. A tradition I will carry on. Me and my sister always eagerly wait at the top of the creaking wood stairs before even the sun wakes up. well, my dad goes to turn all the lights on and sets up his phone camera to record for over an hour of watching us rip apart colorful shiny papers that took hours to wrap and are gone in 1 minute. Our laughs our huge smiles and big eyes. My parents wore smiles for getting mugs for another year in a row or maybe if they were lucky, a drugstore gift that my grandmother brought us to pick out.  I know somewhere buried deep in a camera roll or a folder there are at least 15 recorded Christmases that maybe one day I'll look back on.