For once, I wasn’t homesick on Christmas Day. Back in Perth, some 13,000 kilometres away, my family would be finishing their traditionally excessive Christmas lunch of prawns, quiches and salads. I missed them, but this year I was spending the festive season in northern Finland, literally dashing through the snow on an open sleigh.
Like so many Australians do during their 20s, I’d left home to live abroad for a few years, teaching English in Japan, Slovakia and Germany. Homesickness only hit for two reasons: I was sick, or it was Christmas. The airfares were too expensive to fly
