HEALTH PLUS:Home, with all its sights and sounds and smells, becomes even more important to us at Christmas, writes Marie Murray
CHRISTMAS IS a time when we are more conscious than ever of home. It is a time when those who live away from home think of past Christmases in their own country, with their own families and look forward to returning to celebrate the festive season if they can.
Christmas is a time when those who are unable to return home feel their difference, feel their loneliness and isolation in another country at a deep, regressive and primitive level. Because regardless of how happy, how settled, how integrated, how immersed or embedded in a country and culture we are, there is, truly, no place like home.
One's own country is not just a geographical location. It is a place filled with sights, sounds and smells that belong only to it. For example, here in Ireland, light has its own unique quality, its own nuances and its own dimensions. Where else is there "light and half-light"and the myriad iridescent magnitude of its alterations?
When the sun goes down in many other countries it drops: here it sets slowly, spreading its fading light often in breathtaking patterns that celebrate the day before it ends.
There is consciousness of the sea for us, an island people. For those who live near it, the sea is a visual, auditory and olfactory backdrop to life, with its changing colours, its shifting intensity, its different moods and motion and its sound.
What of its smell, its tangy, salty taste? The sea weaves its way into the very soul of those who live with it, and there is an ache when away from its dominance in the emotional core of a person's life.
Cities have their own momentum: their liveliness, their quiet places, their pace, its city sounds, the tone of its life, timbre of its activity and its shifting occupations throughout day and night. The ear is attuned to the voices from childhood, the conversations, the tones, the accents and semantic structures of its culture and its modes of interaction and exchange. It says to the eye and the ear and the heart, this is home, this is where I began, this is where I belong, where I understand and where I am understood, where I am from.
Home has its images, buildings, architecture, places, nooks, crannies, courtyards, lanes, streets, roads and motorways, familiar, receptive, there. The mind has measured home. It knows this territory.
It judges its distances. It has walked in these places and upon return, if they are still there, they reassure. That is why landmarks are so significant, why we are angry when they disappear, upset when there is too much visual change, because landmarks, whether they are public or private edifices, are part of our visual heritage, part of our early identity, part of who we are, and where we are from. They are psychologically important in welcoming us home.
Home has its own smell, identifiable when one disembarks from boat or train or plane. It fills the nostrils with recognition and reassurance.
The origin of the description "dear dirty Dublin" might lie in the fact that obnoxious or not, its presence, its smell was its own, and its own knew it. But there are other smells that people remember from childhood: the smells of holidays, of summer, of winter, of cooking, of traditional food, the smell of a periwinkle, of fish and chips in newspaper and of a newly pulled pint.
The air in one's place of origin is unique. It has its own quality, own density, own feel with which we fill our lungs inhaling, like homesick children the unique, ineffable essence and comfort of home.
Every sense is recruited in the attachment, the bond, the reassurance, the security, the need we have of home. The essence of a person is deprived of that in another place. New attachments may of course be made but the sights, sounds, tastes, smells and securities of childhood persist in primitive form within us when we go away and fire our need to return, at least periodically, for a reconnection with where we are from and where we belong.
This is potent at times of celebration, at seasonal times, at Christmastime. This maximises longing. This is the repository of memories. Christmastime personifies home, togetherness, the sensuality of the season: carols, cards, cribs and lights, Christmas trees, family meals, giving and receiving and the chaos of unwrapped present paper littering the floor.
Christmas is about coming home to wherever that is and however it is, perfect or imperfect it is a time to reunite with the essence of self and the place that shaped it.
• Clinical psychologist Marie Murray is director of the Student Counselling Services in UCD and her most recent book, Living Our Times, published by Gill Macmillan, has been re-released in paperback