Multi-Cultural Brunch.

This year, my sweetheart and I with our two sons, were invited to a family of five we never have had close contact with. For those invited it was like being incorporated in the most sacred room of a family. Christmas Day Brunch in my country is usually reserved only the inner circle of a family. (It lasts from 13. PM and often to Midnight, and many  still call it Christmas Day Breakfast.) We certainly did not feel like strangers or aliens outside their family, that afternoon.

Instead we felt very welcomed indeed, and a part of their own family, -yes somewhat already incorporated. How can it be that some people open the door to their homes this special day, when people’s threshold usually is so high that only relatives and closest family get inside? I do not claim to know the answer, but I have some thoughts about it:

The family in question is basically multicultural! They have children who are half Macedonian, half Iranian and half Norwegian. They do not go primarily by skin color and ethnicity. They actually take the chance on finding out what lies under all this exterior and culturally determined.

The two families bonded Christmas Day. Their children became ours, and our children theirs! Spontaneous, inspiring and touching speeches were held during the six-hour meal.  The host’s daughter who we already knew and sincerely love, thanked her old grandmother for being an outstanding inspiration of strength, kindness and courage! She also greeted and hailed us, – the “alien”,- but very welcomed family, with many nice words!

Strength and Fragility

Then this young woman said something much more important. She had found a Nepalese gift shop in Stockholm. This Asian gift shop sold trinkets and ornaments, – small fragile figurines and pendants that barely tolerate being touched!

And there inside this intriguing and mysterious shop she had, – to her great surprise and everyone’s laughter around the table, – bought Christmas tree ornaments for over a thousand crowns!  And then she added; (and this is the essence and main reason for me telling you this story)

– “The most valuable in life, is the most fragile and frail. It is so easy to destroy and crush, because it is completely bare, sensitive, open and beautiful! Things we must manage extremely carefully and protect from cracking, because every second they can break into a thousand pieces.”

I immediately associated her words with the wonderful, open and vulnerable mind of the infant and child. The child that we carry with us, inside our rings of memory. http://www.selvuniverset.com/2016/08/18/rings-of-memory/

Then I remembered one time when I embraced her, and almost lifted her light body up from the ground. She, – that powerful girl of creativity and willpower, felt just like a small fragile figurine herself.