Like mother like daughter: a Maritimer spends her first Christmas away from home in Vancouver

This is my first Christmas away from home.

At 27, I've been lucky enough to always make it back to Halifax to spend time with my family.

But this year I moved to Vancouver, and I'll be looking at the Pacific instead of the Atlantic Ocean on Christmas Day.

My mother, Kilby McRae, also spent her first Christmas away from home in Vancouver. She lived here in 1980, when she was almost the same age as I am now.

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I didn't know this until she sent me a letter at the beginning of the month, along with a homemade advent calendar.

Mum described that first Christmas away from her family, eating fish with chopsticks instead of turkey, and wrapping up with plum pudding someone's mother had sent in the mail. She was 24.

And because this is what happens when your kids go into radio, I called her up and asked her about it.

"It seems to me, in all of those years, that was the only Christmas I spent as a single young woman away from home," she told me.

She spent the day with fellow transplanted Maritimers who had switched coasts.

She remembers listening to Joni Mitchell, the "beautiful, lovely deep bowls" they ate out of, diners that are no longer there (The Old Aristocratic, now a Chapters on West Broadway) and watching the lit-up ships in the harbour on New Year's Eve.

But she doesn't remember feeling lonely.

When I asked, she said she mostly remembers feeling pleased about the whole thing.

"I wasn't lonely. I had friends, like you have friends. I was very happy."

Talking with her in that studio booth was the first time I really started to feel homesick about not going back east.

I think she could hear it in my voice, when she said, "I don't expect you to be lonely, and I don't expect you to feel bad that you're not here. Not much, anyway."

Thirty-six years later, I will also be spending Christmas with a former Maritimer, my roommate.

There won't be any plum pudding. She may have sent a cute letter in the mail, but my mother did not follow up with edible goods.

But I think I'll feel the same way she did: away from home but not alone.

With files from CBC Radio One's On The Coast

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