it's coming on christmas.

My parents have a Christmas party every year. They've been hosting it for nearly as long as I've been alive. If I love you most, there's a good chance you've been to it, and so you are familiar with the particularly lovely sensation of eating too much, drinking too much, philosophizing just enough, and possibly setting your hair on fire in the kitchen, much to the chagrin of everyone else's mothers, all in the best-decorated house in the Hamilton area. If you're interested, keep this Saturday evening free.

I always come home for it. I've made it back from varying distances over the years, on planes, trains, and automobiles. There was only one year I didn't quite get there, and that's the year I'm thinking about tonight. It was mid-December, 2008, and I was living out my third weird winter in Ottawa.  It was also the beginning of the OC Transpo strike, which you will doubtless remember if you somehow survived it. A transit strike is a pretty trivial thing to remember in a visceral way, but I do recall exactly where I was that first night. I was at a librarians' pub night at Darcy McGee's, stuffed full of Guinness and Irish Nachos, and it was snowing. I walked home to the Glebe with a couple of my work friends, and the streets were so quiet, the usual noise dampened by the snowfall, the quiet enhanced by the sudden absence of buses lurching by. There was a comforting peace that night of the sort you rarely experienced in the downtown core of our nation's capital, a stillness lit by twinkling Christmas lights.

That comfort and joy evaporated quickly. For anyone trying to get around the city during the weeks and then months of the strike, things were pretty hellish. It got to a point where you couldn't even get yourself a taxi. Even if you somehow sourced one, you couldn't hope for it to drive you where you needed to go in anything resembling a reasonable amount of time. That's how I found myself, the Friday before my parents' party, sitting in my office with a plane ticket to Toronto for that night and no way to get myself to the airport. If we're truthtelling, maybe I'll admit that my defeatist attitude was part of the problem. I'd all but given up on getting home; it just wasn't going to happen. There was something missing from my life in those days, and instead of running after it, I retreated, always.

So I cancelled my ticket, and called my mom, crying. (This was not, sadly, an unusual occurrence in those days.) Then I dragged myself home, and called my then-still-quasi-boyfriend.  He lived in the country, a couple of hours away, and we were constantly in some state of dramatic flux, but I couldn't bear the thought of spending the weekend alone.

"Well, just come out here, then," he said. Sometimes, it was easy for him to tell me what he thought was the right thing. Sometimes.

So I hit the road. It took forever to get past the 417, but I made it. He was house-sitting for his wealthy, stock-character-esque neighbours. They owned a pointless herd of donkeys and two Steinway pianos, among many other things. Back in those earlyish days of our relationship we would go over there and drink wine and I'd noodle endlessly on the keys in my shy way and he would sit next to me, quietly impressed. That's what we did that Friday night. I spent hours playing my favourite Christmas songs, and even though he claimed he hated the holidays, he let me. He rested his head on my shoulder as I sang that  I wished I had a river so long I could teach my feet to fly. Sometime before dawn we stumbled back to his house and passed out in a tangled heap. I could feel his nervous heart beating so fast even as he slept; his arms so tight around me, the strength of his grasp betraying some intimacy he'd never dare to speak aloud.

The next afternoon I called my parents to apologize, again. They told me it was fine, that they understood. There were a few other usual suspects who couldn't make it that night. It was a weird year, they said, one where people weren't quite where they were supposed to be. Tell me something I don't know, I thought to myself.  That night we huddled by the woodstove, and I couldn't stop wondering what was going on at home. I had the not-unfamiliar feeling of being in precisely the right place and precisely the wrong place at precisely the same time. I couldn't believe I hadn't used everything I had in me to get myself home. I wasn't even sure where home was anymore.

I drove back to Ottawa on Sunday around lunchtime, just in time to listen to the Vinyl Cafe. I have complicated feelings about Stuart McLean (if we're truthtelling, I have complicated feelings about public broadcasting in general, although in general they skew pretty positive), but I set those aside at Christmastime. There's something so wonderful and familiar about his Christmas stories, a sense that they're not actually about Dave and Morley, but about your family instead. At the end of the show, Stuart wished everyone a happy Christmas and bade his audience a safe trip home to their families. Some final raw nerve snapped in me in that moment and I nearly had to pull the car off the road to calm myself down. I didn't, though. I kept on driving, heading Northeast, in the exact opposite direction of my family. It didn't feel right, but nothing did, in those days, not really.

I haven't missed a party since. My journeys have gotten progressively shorter these past few years. This year the road's only twelve minutes long, as my mom always likes to point out. It's close enough that I can dash over earlier in the day to drop off a shirt she wants to borrow, close enough that I can sleep over and drive back to my own sweet house in time for breakfast, close enough that I can schlep back later that day to eat leftovers and watch White Christmas with my family. It is so easy to be always coming home when home is at both ends of a short road. Which isn't to say I don't still have a hole in my heart the size of a Steinway or a warm woodstove or a frozen Frontenac County lake. But you have to start somewhere.