Most people have a single place they call home. For me, this word has had multiple different thoughts come to mind over the years. I have mentioned in a previous post I spend all my summers at my grandparents’ house in the village with a big garden, bike rides to lakes, and the best homemade strudel. Over the Christmas holidays this year, of course I went to this place again. That’s what the holiday spirit is for me. Decorating the tree in the living room, watching Czech fairytales all day, baking gingerbread – like most people. But it wouldn’t be proper Christmas time without going to visit my other grandparents, usually for New Years.
What amazed me every time was how one big family is close but also so different. We live in Georgia, a country on the big Kavkaz, my mom’s parents in their countryside, and my dad’s parents spend most of their pension in their little cottage by the woods. That is where we wind up every New Year’s and parts of our summers as well, along with our cousins. A long train ride is followed by a climb up the hill, knees deep in snow usually, carrying our bags for the week. As the old wooden house gets closer and closer, you recognize the wooden train and houses for elves that were built in the summer and start to smell the smoke coming out from the chimney. Once you come inside to defrost, your glasses completely fog up as you sit by the fireplace.
The big reunion with my cousins and grandparents is always about school or how the journey was, but two ours lates we’re outside shoving our faces in the snow and creating tracks for the fastest sled our grandpa had built us. It is a fifty-year-old sled maybe, attached to a pair of skies, long not used, that zooms you down the hill, over the big bump, and all the way to the neighbors across the field.
Did I mention there is no electricity here? Only a bunch of solar powered lamps and a little wooden house outside, serving as a toilet. That’s why the evenings here are spent playing board games, mostly “člověče nezlob se! “, which then ends up being thrown across the room by my cousin who is losing. Or playing a bunch of card games by a candle. And that’s how the week passes by. And faster than you would think, being without a connection to the internet or daily scrolling to pass time. And then we depart back “home”, leaving behind tracks from sledges, a family of snowmen, an empty food cabinet, and sometimes an iglu or two.
