So this is Christmas - With Slight Homesick Feelings

Christmas 2023, Gävle, Sweden: It is minus 15 degrees Celsius, snow piled up in meter-high drifts - like an idyll from a beautiful winter fairy tale. I am celebrating Christmas together with one of my brothers and his family and two younger generations. Children, Christmas presents, Santa Claus with the sack on his back. Bright children’s eyes full of anticipation … Santa is after all still real. An abundance of traditional Swedish Christmas food: mulled wine, gingerbread cookies, pickled herring, cured salmon, eggs, cold cuts, ham, rice porridge, fika with homemade sweets, cookies and cakes … Presents for the children and a small something for us adults. I feel the warmth and togetherness - the jokes, the laughter and the conversations about everything between heaven and earth - with my beloved family.

We have never celebrated Christmas in a religious way in our family, more as a warm family gathering with togetherness across generations. But for me, and for a few others, the Christmas morning service has always been sacred. This year as well. Up at dawn, an icy walk through the city in darkness and cold - bundled up in hat, gloves, winter coat, boots and scarf - to our most magnificent church, where I was also once confirmed. Countless candles, the familiar rituals and hymns … peace of mind. Grateful for these beautiful festive moments, after thus far having celebrated six Christmases in Bali.

This will now be my eighth Christmas in Bali. Everything is different here: 30-degree tropical heat day and night, barefoot in flip-flops among lush jungle and rice fields, and no noticeable Christmas stress. The Balinese themselves do not celebrate Christmas, but since the whole island is shaped by tourism and many Westerners, you see Christmas trees, Santa hats and hear carols here and there. I also have a small “Christmas kit” - a little plastic tree, some colourful lights and garlands - that always comes out, no matter which temporary home I am celebrating in. But now I have my own home, and it feels important to decorate a little more, and a little earlier.

There is a Swedish restaurant in Sanur, Café Smörgås, where I have celebrated a traditional Swedish Christmas for a couple of years, with a Christmas buffet and all kinds of food, Santa hats, carols and silly drinking songs. But this year I chose to order the Swedish Christmas delicacies and have them delivered to my home. A couple of friends are coming over for this original, half-barbaric, indulgent feast. As an expatriate Swede, it always feels special to preserve, at least in part, the old traditions from my homeland. Just as I these days appreciate and welcome the occasions when meeting fellow Swedes and get to speak my mother tongue. A Swedish friend, who has also has lived abroad for many years, agreed with me that it is important. And she added, very truthfully, that you can never be funny in quite the same way, no matter how well you speak another language. I think that is absolutely true.

Other new traditions here include the Christmas Day morning Cacao Ceremony at Zest, a cool restaurant here in Ubud. I create a striking Christmas mandala in the shape of a Christmas tree, the band wears Santa hats and the usual songs are mixed with Christmas tunes. And Santa himself appears as well, dancing wildly and handing out presents. It is truly cozy and atmospheric – a beautiful tradition that I love.

As a Swede, it is primarily the celebration on Christmas Eve, the 24th, that matters most. The highlight for me is the tradition of calling home to Sweden and talking with my siblings and their families. They pass the phone around to everyone who is there celebrating, and I get to speak briefly with each person - all my nieces and nephews, and also waving and say hello to the youngest generation. We have the same tradition at Midsummer, and these calls give me mixed feelings of joy, nostalgia, FOMO, longing and homesickness. But more than anything else, they feel warm at heart.

One Christmas, my brother who loves to joke, sent me a short music clip: “A Sailor’s Christmas in Hawaii.” A crackly recording from 1945, so old-fashioned and naïve even for our parents’ generation, about a sailor stranded in a foreign land, longing to be home for Christmas. At first I was laughing my butt off, but then the tears came. Partly because there was something touching behind his greeting, and partly because at that very moment I felt an overwhelming longing to be there together with my loved ones.

Do I long for home sometimes? Of course I do. But my life here in Bali has somehow become the “default setting” - this is where home is now. The environment, the warmth, the lifestyle, the friends here as well as the language, have become natural to me. Of course I miss family and friends back home, parts of my old way of life, and now and then the changing of the seasons - even winter and cold.

Still, one has to be grateful for technology and social media, which make contact possible: being able to follow each other’s lives on the other side of the world. But also to talk to and see one another through video calls that are completely free. My sister and I talk for about an hour roughly every third week. With my brothers it is less frequent. But my brother Peter has started calling more often, and we have resumed our “Sunday calls” that we used to have several decades ago … it warms my heart. Perhaps he will come and visit Bali next spring. No one from my family of origin has been here yet - and I truly look forward to that happening, and hopefully to more visits in time.

I know that for many friends back home it was hard to understand how I could leave family and friends and move so far away. It is difficult to explain, but it was simply something that had to happen for me - and daring to take that step is something I have never ever regretted. As long as my beloved old mother was alive, I travelled home during the summers and spent several months in Sweden. Since she passed away, it does not feel as essential, and it also requires the financial means.

It is always wonderful to see loved ones again, but over the years I have learned to say goodbye more easily. To accept and let providence decide if and when it is time again. Life here in Bali is a good school in that sense, as you constantly meet people who are moving on - back to their home countries or to new destinations. Some return, but many you will never see again. It may sound cynical, but it is truly liberating to live more in the here and now, and to trust that what is meant to happen will happen.

I truly hope that I will be able to travel home to Sweden this summer. By then, two and a half years will have passed since I last left, and it feels like the time has come. Once the trip is decided and the flight ticket booked, my longing for home usually gains new momentum. I imagine who I will meet, what I will do and experience. And that feeling intensifies the closer departure comes. Hopefully, I will celebrate Midsummer - the second biggest holiday in Sweden after Christmas - with my family: eating herring, dancing around the maypole and picking seven kinds of flowers in the bright, mystical summer night, among elves and other Nordic elemental beings.

But here and now, I am content with soon enjoying Swedish pickled herring here in Bali, and with that I would like to wish all my friends and followers a truly Merry Christmas. May your holiday season be filled with light, love and joy!

What do traditional holidays mean to you?

Is there anything you wish were different about Christmas or other major holidays?

Do you feel a longing for loved ones who are not physically with you - and how do you stay in touch?

What do meetings and farewells mean to you?

With Christmas Lights,

Agneta