My costume as designed by Little Miss 8. I'm still not sure exactly what I was.
It stuns me how spending a relatively measly portion of your life in a place can cement it in your heart forever.
I had long wanted to travel abroad and was expecting that once I’d done so, it would change me. But what I wasn’t expecting was how upon our return to Oz, I would from that point onwards always feel like a little piece of me was missing. The Canadian piece. A piece I hadn’t even known existed, until I lived there.
So huge is my love for all things Canadian, that I now do everything I can – short of painting the house with a maple leaf stencil – to keep the Canucky flame aglow.
This ranges from decorating our home with photos of our jaunts (obviously), Canadian maps (slightly less obviously) and miscellaneous memorabilia collected along the way, to downloading the Vinyl Cafe and other CBC podcasts to accompany me on my commutes into town, to making a concerted effort to keep traditions that we discovered over there, alive. Like Halloween. Indeed, Halloween is not exclusively Canadian, but our experience of it was. I wrote about our very first experience of it in my Canadian newspaper column.
But point is, since getting back, I want to at least try to keep some of those experiences going. And so it was, that this weekend gone, we held our very own homemade (translation = my extremely homebrand style of arts and crafts and creativity) Halloween festivities.
I’d better stop now, for fear of exceeding my awesomeness:blog post quota.
This was all for you Canada. Do I not do you proud?