When we lost our first house back in 2014, it was close to the holiday season. I remember visiting my town square to take one last look at the Christmas lights that decorated every tree and shopfront. Looking back, it feels a little melodramatic — while we’d had to sell our house, we were moving into apartments in the same town. But I still felt an odd sense of finality at the time. I don’t think it was the lights or the town square that really mattered to me. It was actually a feeling of failure and grief of a life we’d only just started but that I considered over already. I didn’t believe that I would ever own a house again.

There’s a sense of belonging that I experienced when I owned a home. I’ve moved a ton since I started college — probably around every other year for almost fifteen years — so rental properties have always felt ephemeral to me. I knew at each place that my living situation was temporary, that I couldn’t make any lasting changes because they weren’t mine, and so we were never able to really make the place feel like home. To put it another way, we had to work with the space, rather than making the space work for us. I was obviously hugely privileged and lucky that I could find a place that I could afford to live at all, but even still, the entire rental system feels set up to reinforce that sense of impermanence.

Because of a lot of hard work and a heaping helping of extremely good fortune, we’ve found ourselves once again the proud owners of a home — as much as someone in today’s economy can own anything with mortgage payments and HOAs and the like. But still, we’re beholden to no landlords and our HOA is (for the time being at least) very hands off and more than willing to live and let live. And now the holiday season is here, our first in our new house. Since my last memories of home ownership so sadly tinged the holidays, being back in a home has made me very emotional.

The holidays are often a time of togetherness; where families that have scattered across the nation or the world travel to be together again and celebrate for a while. For my entire childhood and a decent portion of my early adult life, that location we’d all travel back to was my grandmother’s house. However, our family traditions changed, I graduated college, got a job, and moved away from my home town. As our living situations changed, we traded around Thanksgiving and Christmas locations depending on who had the money to travel and who had the most space to accommodate everyone. But this year, our home has become the place everyone travels to be together again and celebrate for a while.

I spent the past few weeks putting up Christmas lights, the tree, and all the other decorations. I can’t help but smile every time I pull into my driveway and see my house lit in cheerful holiday colors. I got to cook the turkey for the first time in my life because we finally had both the room to host everyone and a working, full-sized oven! (For the record, I spatchcocked the bird and seasoned it with a homemade cajun-style butter rub. It was pretty fucking great, and for my first time making a turkey, I was extremely pleased.) Everyone sat at our table, eating and laughing, and then broke off after dinner to watch Christmas movies in the living room or play card games in the kitchen, just like we always did at my grandma’s house. It sort of cemented that feeling of being home and finally having somewhere I belonged.

Housing is so fucked in this country, and I know that I have and continue to be incredibly lucky on that front. We’ve had our lumps and gone through some rough shit over the past five or so years, but we’ve always had somewhere to live, and we’ve never missed a rent payment. But I can remember making the rent payment and then trying to decide how we could make soup for $10 to last us for a week until I got paid again because $10 was literally all we had. And while I’m not really a Thanksgiving guy because of the bullshit mythology it’s been built on…to have come so far and made it full circle…it’s absolutely what I’m thankful for this season.