“Oh Mom, I’m so excited, we get to have a REAL Christmas tree this year!”

Ezra gushed as he bounced through the craft store beside me. “That doesn’t happen all the time, and it’s WAY better than a paper tree, or a baker’s rack! It makes the house smell SO GOOD! “Of course we do have to sweep breakfast, lunch and dinner,” he added with his signature Eyeore tone.

I couldn’t get a word in edgewise, so I just smiled and nodded my agreement.

This is our fourth homeless Christmas and the first one we’ve spent back in the USA.

• In 2008 we were in Tunisia
• In 2009 we were in Canada
• In 2010 we were in Guatemala
• This year finds us in a fishing cottage on Cape Cod

We’ve never been much for “stuff” but we’re also not the kind of parents who just buy our kids things any time they want it. Christmas and birthdays come with gifts, and because we’re don’t buy toys or treats the rest of the year, there is an anticipation that makes it special. However, since we’re nomads, and our kids have the equivalent of a shoe box to keep their personal possessions in, it’s not about big piles of “stuff.” It can’t be.

It never has been.

I was raised in a family that lived differently and was nomadic by times. We built our own houses from log. My mom sewed a lot of our clothing, We grew, hunted, fished, and preserved a lot of our own food. We made most of our Christmas gifts. Not all of them, but many of them.

In retrospect, this might have been because that was what we could afford, but I think there was more to it than that.

The lesson imparted was one that we work hard in our family to pass on, regardless of the day of year:

“Love People, Not Things”

The Christmas we were in Tunisia we decorated a baker’s rack with the ONE string of lights I managed to have shipped in. Because of the voltage difference they burned very bright, and burned out in under one minute.

• We made paper ornaments
• We made Christmas cookies but couldn’t find any sprinkles to decorate with
• We slept Christmas Eve in a tent on the freezing Saharan sand and shivered while Daddy read the last chapter of A Christmas Carol
• The kids got a fresh pair of hand knit socks, a rubber troll doll that was purchased off of the second hand truck in the souq and a paper cut out coupon good for “one camel ride”
• We shared our precious imported candy canes with our fellow campers & passed out “Happy Christmas” hugs
• The best gift was Grammy & Gramps who gamely flew 30 some hours to suffer in the sand instead of snuggle in their house to make a memory with their grandkids
• It was an unforgettable Christmas

The Christmas we were in Canada mirrored so many of my childhood years.

• Ice skating, sledding & evenings of warm drinks and vicious board games
• My Mom hung a bedsheet from a log beam and showed the kids 35 year old slides from Central America, when they were young and backpacking there
• Ezra, upon seeing Grammy cooking over a camp stove on the shores of Lago de Atitlan asked, “Mama, how come you’re in that picture and when did you have a yellow bikini?” It was grammy.
• The stockings are the best part of Christmas morning and always contain funny things. One year Gramps gave 18 month old Gabe a Cuban cigar. Another year there were snappy magnetic fish that drove me nuts for weeks. Another year everyone got a tape measure, but they ALL had Grampsy’s name on them… so he could claim whichever one was handy. Don’t tell, but this year Santa’s bringing handy sets of travel bamboo cutlery & chopsticks, as our plastic sporks have worn out.
• My Dad buys crazy stuff, and has been known to throw a handful of squirrel corn into a box to put an especially good guesser off of the scent of it’s contents.
• Oh, and one year he wrapped a box that they’d sent to Brazil for my brother at Christmas that took THREE YEARS to find it’s way back to Canada, undelivered. That was by far the best gift that year. It still included the letters we’d all written to him.

Last Christmas we were in Guatemala and decorated a bureau with green construction paper in the shape of a tree. Our gardener thought we were nuts.

• I sewed, by hand 14 Christmas stockings out of Mayan corte fabric in rainbow stripes, for the eight guests that rounded out our family of six.
• Grandma & Grandpa’s Great braved their first international trip to join their babies in the highlands
• We broke a pinata with our neighbours and Hannah broke her foot.
• Christmas afternoon was spent cliff jumping into the lago
• While I had Hannah at the village doctor, the backpacking kids became Grandma’s kitchen army and they all cooked Christmas dinner for me.

This Christmas we’re on Cape Cod.

• We have a real tree, and lots of lights.
• The Guatemalan stockings are hung on a ribbon on the wall & the straw ornaments we carefully packed home from Chichicastenango are shivering in this northern climate
• The Canadian grandparents are on their way, they find us no matter how far we wander
• Christmas gift production is well under way

What are we giving this year?

• Hannah is carefully drawing a series of blackline dragons to make into colouring books for her brothers
• Gabriel is secretive about his plans
• Elisha is making potholders and carefully painting greeting cards to give as sets
• Ezra is in full Hama bead ornament production
• I’m knitting like mad, enjoying my sewing machine (hauled out of storage for a month) and repurposing Goodwill sweaters for a secret, special plan
• Tony is making wine; lots of wine

Of course there will be packages under the tree

The joy of giving is one of the things that marks the season for us. But the gift so rarely comes wrapped in paper and topped with a bow.

• The gift is hearing your kid whoop and throw his hat in joy from the top of a camel
• The gift is hearing the kids sort out who gets to ride the chicken bus into the city to meet the Grandparents at the airport, “Ez took the train in Tunisia, Elisha got to get Grandma & Grandpa’s Great, it’s GABE’s turn to get Grammy… Don’t worry Hannah, you can go get Ruth!”
• The gift is Gramps complimenting Daddy on the way he does voices when reading A Christmas Carol.
• The gift is the kids screaming through the same canals on ice skates that I did as a child.
• The gift is Ez mistaking Grammy for me in old, sepia toned slides
• The gift is kids who are over joyed at one minute of extra bright Christmas lights and then are sad because someone spent the time and money to ship them, not because they didn’t get to enjoy them long.
• The gift is hunting far and wide for enough green paper to cover a bureau and the amusement of the house staff at the construction process
• The gift is tears in Grandma’s eyes as she celebrates her first Christmas abroad and says, “Now I get why you live this way. I get it.”
• The gift is in making “home” for just a minute for six lonely backpackers who are too far from their own Mamas on Christmas and sneakily making sure they got gifts and cards from their own families.
• The gift is being able to give the gift of an open door, a full table, laughter, love and memories, not just for ourselves, but for anyone brave enough to walk through our door

There’s a lot of talk about the commercialism of Christmas and how terrible that is.

And there’s a lot of talk about how to avoid it.

• To me, that’s the wrong focus. Christmas isn’t about the gifts, and to focus on reducing or eliminating those, or what to do “instead” really just makes it more about the stuff in some ways.

Instead, for us, Christmas is just a time to do even more of what we try to live out every day of the year, no matter where in the world we are living.

It’s a time to give, not just gifts, but:

• Acts of service
• Time
• Meals
• Friendship
• A hug
• A listening ear
• Patience
• Grace
• Forgiveness
• Laughter

It’s a time to consider how to make those around us feel special and loved. For some, that may mean a store bought gift. For others it might just be a sanctuary away from their real life, to rest, sleep a lot, eat homemade bread and walk the beach alone, or together, for a week.

Christmas, like so many other things, is purely a matter of focus, and priorities. For us, that’s summed up neatly in our family mantra:

Love People, Not Things

What do you think? What “makes” Christmas for you?

Want to read more? Some of my traveling friends have weighed in:

A King’s Life: Forget the Gifts, Give an Experience this Christmas

Pearce On Earth: A Different Kind of Christmas

Family Trek: What’s For Christmas? Dear Santa, do we really need more stuff?

The Nomadic Family- Poverty for Christmas

New Life on the Road – Dear Mr Santa Claus Whats For Christmas

With 2 Kids In Tow, It’s Backpacking We Go: Dear Santa, For This Christmas We Wish…

Living Outside of the Box – The Best Christmas Presents

Discover Share Inspire – Christmas is Coming – What Do We Give on the Road?

Bohemian Travelers- Gift giving while living a simpler life

Little Aussie Travellers – Presence vs Presents Christmas Time for Travelling Families

Family Travel Bucket List – Feliz Navidad Without All the Stuff

Livin On The Road’s kids

Susan –

Peter

a minor diversion – Reinventing Christmas

Carried on the Wind – Christmas Giving

Wheel Education’s Daughter