THE SANTABLOG SERIES, DAY 8. (Finding Home Again When You Thought You Lost It)

THE SANTABLOG SERIES

DAY 8

_{Press play before you scroll. Let’s get into that Christmas spirit. Let’s go ho ho}

There is something about early December that makes the idea of home feel different. Not the physical building. Not the place where the bills sit on the counter or the dishes pile up. But home in the deeper sense. The version of home that exists somewhere between memory and feeling. The version that shows up the moment you let yourself slow down long enough to actually feel something. It is strange how Christmas can pull that out of you without warning. One cold morning, one familiar smell, one song drifting through a supermarket, and suddenly you are thinking about home in a way you have not done all year.

You could be standing in your kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil, watching the steam rise from the cup, and out of nowhere you will think of the house you grew up in. The one with the cold windows and the odd creaking noise in the hallway. The one you thought you would never miss, yet here you are feeling the pull of those old walls like they still hold a piece of you. You remember the warm glow from the living room when the tree lights were on. You remember the sound of wrapping paper being ripped open. You remember the smell of something cooking long before you were allowed in the kitchen. Those memories arrive out of nowhere and you hold them for a moment before they drift away again.

December does that.
It opens a door you thought time had closed.

It brings back the feeling of belonging, even if the place no longer exists. It brings back the sound of familiar voices, even if those voices have grown older or quieter. It brings back a version of yourself you forgot you once were. Not a perfect version. Not a cinematic version. Just the real, messy, warm, loud, soft, confusing mixture of childhood and family and the kind of chaos that only makes sense years later.

Maybe that is why Christmas hits so differently as an adult.
You start to realise how much of “home” was actually people rather than places.
And you start to realise how much has changed.

You think about the homes you have lived in since. The flats with thin walls. The houses you shared with people you no longer speak to. The places that felt temporary. The places you left behind without a second thought. The places you stayed longer than you should have because you were trying to save money or trying to keep someone else happy. None of those places felt like home in the way childhood did. They offered shelter but not warmth. Function but not comfort. And yet, they are part of you now too, woven into the story of who you are.

There are moments when you walk through your current home and feel something flicker. A warm memory. A sense of safety. A hint of belonging. You do not always notice it, but it is there. It appears in the soft light of the morning when the house is quiet. It appears when someone laughs in the room and the sound fills the space. It appears when you sit down at the end of the day and let your body rest. These moments are gentle reminders that home does not arrive all at once. It grows slowly, without announcement, until one day you realise you have built something that feels like yours.

But December also reminds you that not all homes are happy ones. You think about the people who dread this time of year because home was never safe for them. People who grew up in houses filled with shouting, coldness, or silence. People who never associated Christmas with warmth. People who had to tiptoe around those they lived with. People who never got that feeling of comfort. People who now carry that emptiness with them, wondering why everyone else seems to feel something magical that they never did.

You think about people who lost their home in a different way. People who have lost someone who made their house feel alive. Someone whose laugh filled the room. Someone who held the family together. Someone whose absence leaves a space you can feel even when the room is crowded. Christmas can feel colder for people like that because the memories hit harder. The songs sound different. The lights look dimmer. The day feels longer.

It is strange how one time of year can pull so many different emotions out of people. Some feel nostalgia. Some feel joy. Some feel longing. Some feel grief. Some feel lost. Some feel rooted. Some feel like home is still out of reach. And some feel like they are still trying to figure out where they belong.

You stand there thinking about all of this and realise how complicated the idea of home really is. It is never just a building. It is every memory that shaped you. Every person who cared for you. Every moment that made you feel safe or scared or known or unseen. It is every version of yourself that lived inside different walls at different stages of your life. It is the comfort you did have and the comfort you wished for. It is the warmth you remember and the warmth you are still searching for.

And when Christmas rolls around, that meaning gets louder.
It settles in your chest like a weight and a comfort at the same time.
A quiet reminder that home is not simple and it never will be.
But it is something you can understand more deeply now than you ever did before.

December has a way of pulling the truth out of you.
Especially the truths you ignore the rest of the year.

The more you think about home, the more you realise how much it changes as you grow up. When you are young, home feels like the center of the universe. It is the place where everything begins and ends. It is where you learn what comfort feels like. It is where you learn what fear feels like. It is where you learn how people express love, even when they do it imperfectly. It is the backdrop to every Christmas morning, every rushed school run, every argument, every moment that shaped you long before you understood what shaping even meant.

You remember the little details that meant nothing at the time but feel huge now. The sound of the heating kicking in on cold mornings. The way your breath fogged the windows when you leaned against them. The way the hallway lights looked when you crept downstairs too early. The smell of roast potatoes drifting through the house hours before lunch. The way certain family voices carried through the walls. The sound of the neighbours dragging the wheelie bin outside. These things are ordinary, but they sit in memory like something sacred because they remind you of who you were before life became complicated.

And then you grew up.
And home changed.

Not always dramatically. Not always painfully. Sometimes it changed gradually in ways you barely noticed. You moved out. You learned that independence is not as glamorous as it looks from the outside. You learned how expensive everything is. You learned that silence in your own place feels different from the silence in your childhood home. You learned that loneliness can exist even in a space that belongs entirely to you. And somewhere along the way you realised that adulthood does not automatically come with a feeling of belonging. You have to build that yourself.

There is something strange about returning to a childhood home as an adult. The walls look smaller. The ceilings look lower. The furniture is different. The garden is not as big as you remember. The magic has faded, not because the place changed, but because you did. You walk through the rooms and they feel like a museum filled with ghosts of the person you used to be. It is nostalgic, but it can also be unsettling. You start to understand that the version of home you miss is not the building. It is the time. It is the people. It is the version of yourself that lived there.

And sometimes that home is gone. Sold. Renovated. Emptied. Demolished. Or simply changed beyond recognition. You could drive past it and it would not feel like yours anymore. That realisation hits in a quiet, heavy way. It makes you see that home was never about bricks or paint. It was the life that happened inside them. It was the moments that cannot be recreated. It was the warmth that lived there because of the people who filled it.

Time has a way of peeling those layers back.
It also has a way of creating new ones.

As an adult, you start building different places that serve as home in their own way. The small flat where you learned to survive on your own. The rented house that never felt like yours but taught you how to manage responsibilities. The shared spaces where friendships grew. The temporary places that held pieces of your life. They might not hold the same emotional weight, but they mattered. They carried the version of you who was learning, adapting, healing, or starting over.

And then there is the home you are in now. The one that feels like a work in progress. Not perfect. Not finished. Not always tidy. Not always calm. But yours. Or partly yours. Or becoming yours slowly. This home carries a different kind of meaning. It is shaped by the life you have now. It is shaped by the person you have become. It is shaped by the choices you made, the people you let in, the things you survived, the memories you created through adulthood.

Yet, December still finds a way to make you compare these homes without meaning to. You stand in your current living room and wonder why it does not feel the way Christmas felt when you were young. You walk through the rooms and feel something missing that you cannot quite name. You hang decorations but they do not carry the same spark. You put up the tree and it feels different somehow. Not worse. Not wrong. Just different.

Because it is not meant to feel the same.
It cannot feel the same.
You are not that child anymore. Your life is bigger, heavier, more layered now. You carry responsibilities that younger you never imagined. You carry memories that changed you. You carry losses that softened you in ways nothing else could. You carry dreams that grew as you did. Christmas does not hit the same because you are not the same. And that is not a bad thing. It is just a truth you learn slowly.

But even with all the changes, Christmas still brings something out of you. It makes you pause long enough to feel the distance between who you were and who you are now. It makes you realise how much you have endured, how much you have learned, how much you have outgrown, and how much you have built on your own. It makes you think about the people who shaped you, the people you lost, the people you still have, and the people you have yet to meet. It makes you see that home is not a fixed place. It moves with you.

It lives inside you in ways you never expected.
And sometimes, without noticing, you carry pieces of every home you ever lived in.

There are moments in your current life when you catch yourself doing something you learned years ago. Folding blankets the way someone in your family used to. Making a meal the way you watched someone make it when you were small. Putting up decorations in a style that echoes an old memory. You do these things without thinking, not out of habit, but out of something softer. Something deeper. Something that comes from a place you once called home.

And maybe that is the real truth Christmas highlights.
Home is not a single thing.
It is not found in one place.
It is a collection of moments and memories and lessons and people and feelings that follow you through life.

The more you sit with the idea of home, the more you understand that not everyone has one in the way people talk about during December. Some people grew up in houses that never felt warm. Places that should have been safe, but weren’t. Places where the walls held arguments instead of laughter. Places where silence felt heavier than noise. Places where Christmas did not bring excitement, only tension. It is hard to talk about that kind of home because the world makes you believe everyone else had something better. Something softer. Something worth remembering. But the truth is, many people carry memories they do not speak about, especially at this time of year.

For some, Christmas was the most stressful day of the year. The pressure of pretending everything was fine when it clearly wasn’t. The forced smiles. The family members who only showed up to keep up appearances. The arguments that always seemed to start over nothing. The feeling of wanting to escape but having nowhere to go. It can take years for a person to admit that their childhood Christmases were painful. And even when they finally do, the sadness that comes with it never fully disappears. It becomes a quiet ache that resurfaces every December when the world starts talking about joy and magic.

And there are people who lost home in a different way. Maybe through grief. Maybe through distance. Maybe through time slowly pulling people apart. There are chairs at tables that will never be filled again. Voices that once filled the kitchen that will never be heard in the same room. These losses linger in December more than any other month. You can be laughing one moment and suddenly feel the absence of someone you wish could still walk through the door. The warmth of memory mixes with the sting of the reality that things will never be exactly as they once were.

Even people who have a roof over their head can feel homeless in ways that have nothing to do with bricks or insulation. You can be surrounded by people and still feel like a stranger in your own home. You can sit at a dinner table and feel like you do not belong there. You can join in the holiday noise and still feel like you are standing outside looking in. Home is meant to be a place where you feel seen and safe, but not everyone was given that. Some people had to teach themselves what comfort looks like because they were never shown it.

And then there are the people who never really had a stable home at all. People who moved constantly. People who stayed in places that changed from week to week. People who lived with different relatives, or in foster care, or in temporary accommodation, or in shared houses where privacy did not exist. These people grow up learning that home is not guaranteed. That the floor can shift from beneath you at any time. That belonging is not something handed to you. It is something you fight to create.

There are adults now who still carry the effects of those unstable years. They struggle to relax in their own space because their mind still expects to be uprooted. They decorate their house quickly and then stop, unsure how long they will stay. They find it difficult to attach to places because they have been forced to detach so many times. And when Christmas arrives, it highlights all of that. It shows them the gap between what they had and what they wanted. It reminds them of the homes they longed for but never received.

And of course, there are people who experience December in ways no one should. People living in freezing conditions without a safe place to sleep. People relying on shelters. People who have lost everything. People who walk past glowing windows knowing they will not feel that warmth. It is impossible to pretend that Christmas is magical for everyone when so many people are trying to survive through the coldest part of the year.

You notice them more in December. Not because they are suddenly there, but because your heart sharpens when everything around you is soft and glowing. A person sitting on the pavement holding a cup. Someone wrapped in blankets near a busy street. Someone digging through bins behind a supermarket. Someone staring through the window of a café just to catch a few minutes of heat. These sights stay with you because they cut through the noise of the season. They remind you of the things that really matter. They remind you that the world is far from fair.

Christmas brings out the extremes of human experience.
Joy and loss.
Warmth and cold.
Belonging and loneliness.
Comfort and fear.
Togetherness and distance.
Hope and heartbreak.

And somewhere in the middle of all that is the truth that home is not guaranteed. It is not a universal experience. It is something people are still trying to find or rebuild or understand. When you see the world with that kind of honesty, it changes the way you move through it. It makes you softer toward people. It makes you slower to judge. It makes you want to offer kindness instead of coldness. It makes you grateful for the pieces of home you do have, whether they are physical or emotional. It makes you more aware of the places inside you that still need care.

December has a way of touching those parts.
It exposes the cracks.
It brings back the memories.
It highlights the longing.
It shows the fragility in people.
And it reminds you that everyone, in their own way, is looking for home.

At some point, you realise the meaning of home shifts again. Not back to childhood, not back to anything you lost, but forward into something new. It happens slowly, almost quietly, without any grand moment to mark the transition. You just wake up one day and notice that the people around you feel more important than the place you are in. You notice that comfort has changed shape. You notice that the idea of home has nothing to do with where you live, and everything to do with who you let close.

Home becomes the friend who answers the phone before it rings out.
Home becomes the person you can sit in silence with and feel completely understood.
Home becomes the familiar hand on your back when life feels too heavy.
Home becomes the laugh you could recognise across a crowded pub.
Home becomes the person who sees the version of you that even you forget to notice.

You start to realise that the feeling you spent years searching for in old walls can actually be found in moments that last only seconds. Moments where you feel safe without needing to explain yourself. Moments where your body relaxes without being told. Moments where you feel known in a way that does not need words.

It is strange how adulthood teaches you this.
You spend so long chasing the idea that home is something you must build perfectly, something you must earn, something you must buy or own or design. And then one day you notice that the real sense of home lives in connections. Conversations. Shared memories. Comfort. Warmth. Trust. Moments that hit deeper than any bricks ever could.

Some people experience this through love.
Not the cinematic kind where everything works out neatly, but the real version. The complicated, soft, messy version where two people gradually reveal themselves. Where someone listens to the parts of your story you never thought you would say out loud. Where someone sees your flaws and stays anyway. Where someone makes the world feel less overwhelming because they exist in it with you. When you find that, even for a short while, it feels like your soul recognises something it has been missing.

Other people find home in friendship.
The kind of friendship that stretches across years. The kind that feels like family you got to choose. The kind where you know each other’s habits, heartbreaks, humour, and history. The kind where you can go weeks without speaking and still pick up like nothing changed. That sort of connection can anchor you more than any building ever will. It becomes a home you can return to no matter where your life takes you.

Some people find home in their children, or in their pets, or in their passions. In the things that give their life meaning. In the things that remind them they are still capable of feeling something powerful and real. Home can be built from anything that brings you back to yourself when the world becomes too loud.

And for many people, home becomes something internal.
It becomes the place inside you that no one else can touch. The resilience you built through years of surviving things you never thought you would survive. The self-respect you learned when you finally set boundaries. The calm you found through healing. The strength you discovered every time you had to start over. At some point, home becomes the person you have grown into.

December reveals this in a way no other month does. The lights, the songs, the cold air, the memories, the pressure, the expectation, the hope. All of it blends together and forces you to see what really matters. You begin to understand that you are allowed to build a home that looks nothing like the one you came from. You are allowed to create new traditions. You are allowed to protect your peace. You are allowed to choose who belongs in your life and who doesn’t. You are allowed to make a home that feels right for the person you are now.

There is something comforting in that.
Something freeing.
Something grounding.

It takes away the pressure to recreate the past.
It removes the weight of comparison.
It softens the ache of what you lost.
It opens the door for something better.

Because home does not have to be perfect to be meaningful.
It does not have to be loud to be real.
It does not have to match the world’s idea to matter.

It just has to feel like a place where your shoulders drop.
A place where you can exhale.
A place where you can be yourself without armour.
A place where the world feels a little less sharp for a moment.

And sometimes the most surprising thing about adulthood is realising that you are already building that without even noticing. The late-night conversations. The warm cups of tea. The inside jokes. The people you choose to see again. The stability you create with your own hands. The memories you are making now, quietly, without ceremony. These are the things that shape your meaning of home.

One day, years from now, you will look back and realise this chapter of your life had a warmth you did not fully appreciate at the time. You will remember the way someone’s voice softened when they spoke to you. You will remember the way your room glowed in the evening light. You will remember the comfort of someone who made you feel safe. These moments will become the new version of home, the one you built slowly, the one you earned through growth and patience.

And that is the most hopeful part of all of this.
You are not done creating home.
You are still shaping it, still learning, still discovering the people and moments that will matter for the rest of your life.

When you reach this point in December, something shifts. Not in a dramatic way. Not with fireworks or some big life-changing moment. It shifts quietly, the way a room changes when someone opens a window. A bit more air. A bit more space to think. A little more light than you expected. You start to realise that all the pressure you feel around Christmas comes from the idea that you must somehow relive something that no longer exists. That you must recreate a feeling from a time you can’t go back to. That you must make everything perfect simply because a date on the calendar says so.

But the truth is… you don’t.
You are not failing if Christmas feels different now. You are not letting anyone down if you can’t make it feel like it used to. You are not broken if this month feels heavier than you want it to. You are not behind. You are not missing something everyone else has. You are just human. And being human means carrying memories and losses and hopes and fears all at the same time.

Some days you might feel that warmth that everyone talks about.
Some days you won’t.
Both are normal.
Both are allowed.

Home, in the end, is not a place you return to. It is something you build through thousands of tiny moments that nobody else sees. It is waking up earlier than you wanted and putting the kettle on. It is choosing the people in your life with more intention than you did when you were younger. It is learning to let go of old expectations. It is forgiving yourself for the times you didn’t know better. It is showing kindness even when the world feels cold. It is giving love even when you worry you have nothing left. It is letting people love you back.

There is something powerful in realising that you can make your own meaning of home, even if you didn’t grow up with the best version of it. You can take the softness you wished someone had given you and become that softness for someone else. You can take the safety you never felt and create it now. You can take the warmth you missed and build it piece by piece. It does not matter how late in life you start. It only matters that you try.

And maybe that is what Christmas really is, beneath all the noise.
A reminder that home is a living thing.
A reminder that it changes shape as you grow.
A reminder that love does not disappear just because life gets complicated.
A reminder that you are allowed to rebuild, restart, reimagine, and redefine.

Sometimes December shows you the people who feel like home now. The ones who make you laugh even when your head is heavy. The ones who check on you without being asked. The ones who give you space when you need it and pull you closer when you are drifting. The ones who understand your silences. The ones who make you forget, for a moment, how messy life can be. These people become the warm lights you follow back to yourself.

And sometimes, home is just you.
The version of you who made it this far.
The version who survived things no one else knows about.
The version who kept going when it would have been easier to stop.
The version who built strength out of moments that should have broken you.

If there is one thing you take from today, let it be this.
You are allowed to create a home that feels right for you, even if nobody else understands it. You are allowed to keep the traditions you love and abandon the ones that drain you. You are allowed to protect your peace. You are allowed to make this December simple, quiet, or as soft as you need it to be. You are allowed to build something new without feeling guilty for what came before.

Home is not behind you.
It is not lost.
It is not gone forever.
It is waiting for you in the life you are still creating.

And maybe this year, maybe even today, you will feel a small shift.
A warm moment.
A quiet second of peace.
Something that reminds you that you are not as far from home as you think.
Something that shows you that home is not a memory you chase.
It is something you grow into.

So give yourself permission to build it slowly.
To build it honestly.
To build it in your own way.
To build it with people who feel like safety.
To build it with moments that bring you back to yourself.

Because home is not the place you came from.
Home is the place you choose next.
And you are choosing it every single day without even noticing.

🎅THEPLAINANDSIMPLEGUY🎅

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