Letting the Holidays Feel Like Home

Some kinds of belonging don’t show up after you finish the paperwork or learn the rules. They arrive quietly in the middle of a holiday or a gathering. A Lunar New Year fair, a summer barbecue. What stays with you is usually not the noise, but the softer feeling that we are not just passing through here, we are living here.

I placed this story in the collection because it is not really about the events themselves. It is about how a family slowly grows familiar with a place far from where it started. Sometimes what relaxes you is not understanding everything. It is beginning to find your place in the life around you.