The sweet familiarity of home

Our family spent a wonderful Christmas in my hometown, Kansas City. It was a long overdue holiday spent together with our girls and my brother and his family.

I got to play tourist and marvel at how much the city has grown since I lived there in the 1980s. The downtown core now boasts a wide variety of apartments and loft living spaces, restaurants and entertainment venues serviced by an electric streetcar.

The suburbs on the Kansas side of the metro area, where I grew up, have grown from modest neighborhoods with a handful of malls to sprawling cities in their own right.

But beyond the many changes, I felt the sweet familiarity of home – the Christmas lights in the Country Club Plaza shopping district, the city’s lovely boulevard system, the tidy red brick apartment buildings with porches, the way conversations turn to how the Chiefs are playing.

It’s good to go home and catch up. It brings perspective as we enter the new year. It reminds us what’s important and what’s not. It’s the best gift of the season.