I’m homesick for a place I can’t return to. For a feeling, a warmth in my chest that visits less regularly now.
For the magic I felt on Christmas Eve as a little girl, driving from the candlelight service at church to my grandparents’ house for Christmas dinner. In my memory, there was always fresh snow on the ground, reflecting our headlights as we pulled in the driveway. For the sheer awe I felt at receiving a gift I didn’t expect. The sound of laughter around a table. The prayer my grandfather would say before the meal that always choked him up. The warm car on the way home, Amy Grant’s Tennessee Christmas playing as we watched the lights through the frosted windows.
The way the kitchen smelled like all the cookies my mom was constantly baking, before I knew how stressed out the expectations of the season could make her. The excitement when my grandparents arrived on Christmas morning with a giant bag of toys; my grandma always wearing a dangly pair of snowmen earrings.
I’m homesick for a time when people were just people, not layers of complicated emotions and traumas and hopes and expectations. Homesick for a time when I believed my parents really could fix everything for me.
I’m grateful there was a time any of this was true for me—I realize that is a luxury. And people were never really just people; I was just too young to understand the depth behind what I saw. I experienced open arms and homes and breakfasts for dinner. Sleepovers and sledding on snow days and homemade popcorn popped on the stove.
None of these are new concepts, but this was the first holiday season without two of my grandparents, and it was striking how much things have changed. They are everywhere around me and I feel them always, but they are so wholly absent.
We’ve sold their condo, and the listing photos stopped me in my tracks. Goggy should be sitting at the kitchen table in her robe, her iPad and the daily newspaper spread out in front of her, completing all of her puzzles. Grandpa should be in his office sitting in the leather swivel chair, watching golf on the tiniest television still functioning in 2024. They should answer the phone on the counter immediately when I call, even though they could never hear me well over the phone. I should be able to get to them.
But the house is impossibly empty. Goggy left a book open on her leather footstool the night before she passed. A chapter never finished. Life stopped right in the middle of living.
I know for certain there was never a day she didn’t treat as a gift. I don’t remember which Christmas it was that stopped feeling like awestruck magic, but I find myself trying to get back to that feeling often. Leaning into the rituals of advent, soaking in the moments with my loved ones, trying to find joy in the small things again.
The moments may not last as long anymore, but the glimmers are still there. The magic of a new day to live, more moments to tell my friends the things I love about them, to call my mom to talk about nothing, to kiss my dog on his long nose. I don’t know how to get back to my younger, more hopeful self. But each time I experience one of those glimmer moments, I feel the tiniest bit closer.
It snowed today in Nashville—about five inches. We get about one good snow a winter, so it’s always an event. And today was joyful. I saw a dozen couples going for walks together, bundled head to toe. All the neighborhood kids were building snowmen and sledding. At twenty-nine, I made a snow angel and threw some pretty top notch snowballs. My dog pranced around collecting clumps of snow on his paws but not caring one bit (until we got back inside, of course).
I returned to a warm home, those moments of play restoring something in me. The snow makes the winter much brighter in more ways than one—the frozen world reflecting even the smallest bits of light in the darkness.

Olivia graduated from Calvin in May 2018 with a double major in business and writing. She now works as an editor in Nashville, Tennessee and is eating her way through the restaurants of her new town. She enjoys weekend trips with friends, petting other people’s dogs, and drinking coffee like a Gilmore Girl.
I can only say thank you. Thank you for putting into words exactly how I feel.
Beautifully rememberer. I so feel these things. What an honor to be seen like that!.
You are incredibly perceptive of the love and loss that shape our lives, able to beautifully express both. How grateful we are to have the light that shines in our darkness, whether that be sunlight off snow, love shared by grandparents and parents, words written by a thoughtful person like you, and most especially, that of the Creator who gave us all. Thank you for giving us a moment to reflect.