The bliss of things familiar

September holidays have arrived. Something so familiar. We grew up, knowing that every few months there would be school holidays. It is amazing how life revolves around those predictable events. Each society has different events that shape their year. Moving overseas, losing these events is just one of the losses that one has to cope with. Both the Japanese and American school years are very different from the Australian one. We longed for the familiarity of the Australian system within which we grew up and later worked (my husband, at least). I felt positively bouncy this morning, not because I was well rested (still recovering from a busy weekend) but because another familiar event had arrived. It was a lovely feeling. Many times we long for these familiar landmarks when we live in Japan. The American school year drags along and we get to the end exhausted, because we've longed for the familiar, regular breaks of our home culture. The weirder thing that it does is mess up your internal calendar. If you add the change in hemispheres and therefore a swapping of seasons it becomes crazy. Often I'm left wondering if it is Easter or Christmas coming up next. Sometimes if I'm pressed quickly to say which month it is, I get it wrong when I'm in Japan. All the signals are mixed up. My husband will start humming Christmas carols in May - when the weather is warming up. When we're longing for a spring break of two weeks, all we get is a long weekend. Easter happens when the weather is warming up, instead of cooling down! All mixed up. So, it is nice to be home. All the seasons are in the correct place, the holidays and other time-markers occur at precisely the right times. So comforting. We're looking forward to turning the cricket on when it gets really hot and preparing for Christmas in shorts and t-shirts. No one who grew up in the northern hemisphere understands that!