Home for the Holidays

We are home in Cincinnati, having touched down at the Dayton airport on Thursday morning after a short trip to Denmark by way of Orlando. We spent the Thanksgiving holiday in Copenhagen. We didn't sit down for the traditional turkey dinner on Thursday with family, but we did sit down for a very good dinner and warm evening conversation with cousins of Johannes earlier in the week, and later in the week we enjoyed several days with old and good friends in Aalborg. And we had taken advantage of our Orlando safe departure point (safe because we thought we might not have to fight bad weather if leaving from Chicago or the northeast, and we were right) to spend a day with my aunt, who is approaching 92 and still living independently in Kissimmee. Good visits, all.

Now I have done three loads of laundry, and most of the books, DVDs, recipes, clothing, Christmas decorations, and food that we acquired in Denmark have found their proper places. Well, the Christmas material is in a staging area until I pack the fall decorations away--they were out a very short time this year. And yes, I did carefully avoid the customs' officer's question "Did you bring any food with you?" and waited to answer "no" until he specified "fruit, vegetables, meat." We declared the two bottles of aquavit, and I kept my mouth shut, until now, about the seven packages of kransekager that I was bringing back to the julefest of the Scribblers and Readers groups of the Scandinavian Society of Cincinnati. I honestly forgot about the ham bouillon cubes, the cardamom, and the yellow dried peas for soup that I had purchased the week before. (It's hard to believe that I blanked out about the cardamom after the security agent in Copenhagen airport had thoroughly disrupted my carry-on bag, searching for a container the size of a roll-on deodorant, and came up with a spice jar instead, but these lapses happen when you travel over time zones.)

In addition to catching up with work, I have spent time creating a fun quiz for the Scandinavian fest on Monday. It has been interesting to have thoughts of, for the most part, descendants of Scandinavians who formerly immigrated to the U.S. and of friends and family who are presently living in Denmark all going through my head at the same time. Thoughts of those journeys and those efforts to create home shuffle around with thoughts generated by the book, The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia (Michael Booth), which we discussed at Readers and which I am using as a springboard for the Christmas party quiz. Part of the conversation with others and with myself over the past two weeks has been a new awareness of immigrants who returned to their home country--and we could include expats in that group--and why and how. And so I woke this morning with a deep appreciation of the experience of living in this modern world that now makes it relatively easy to travel periodically from one home to another and to enable individuals to preserve and strengthen ties with friends and family no matter where they live.