Over the holidays, thereʻs no better time to think about home. But maybe in a different way.

When it comes to coming back home, Hawaiʻi is not a magnet. It’s a beacon. 

There’s a big difference. A magnet draws you toward it. It’s a strong, unstoppable pull, like coming back home to stay.

A beacon is more complicated. It can be both an inspiration and a warning, not a one-way pull.  Something less certain and less dominant. Like the bright, rotating beacon atop a lighthouse, it’s both a warm sign that you are home as well as a warning that choppy waters may lie ahead, like why you left in the first place.

The idea that Hawaiʻi is a home-drawing magnet is a myth.

Here are four stories about home and the holidays that show how and why. One is about how a bank in Hawaiʻi fosters the myth that Hawaiʻi is a magnet drawing folks who have left back home. 

Two are home-for-the-holiday stories that are not directly about Hawaiʻi but are relevant enough to teach us something about home here.

The final story is about iconic island songs about home, “Honolulu City Lights” and “Waikiki.” On the surface, these songs are about the magnetic pull of living in Hawaiʻi. Dig deeper, though, and they are not about that at all.

A Bank Sells The Myth

First Hawaiian Bank is running a 30-second TV commercial about home that’s full of rosy hues and slippery, unanswered questions.

The ad goes like this. Grandma and Grandpa have just ended a video call with their young family.  “I wish they could move back home,” tutu says wistfully.

Looking up from his newspaper, grandpa asks, “Should we build an ohana unit? (Pause) Yes! Yes!”

And so, they do.

“Yes! Yes!”  It’s that simple. Actually, No! No! It isn’t.

No mention of what it costs, how the young returnees will make a living or whether they even want to give up their life elsewhere and come home at all.

A sweet, simple rosy picture if you leave out those pesky, complexifying thorns about coming home to your roots.

Home For The Holidays

“Oh, there’s no place like home for the holidays,” the old crooner (born 1912, the same year as my dad) Perry Como sang:

“ʻCause no matter how far away you roam

If you want to be happy in a million ways
For the holidays, you can’t beat home, sweet home”

Like this guy from Tennessee:

“I met a man who lives in Tennessee,
He was headin’ for Pennsylvania, and some homemade pumpkin pie.”

You can feel the pull, can’t you? The tastes, the touch, the familiarity, those magnetic pulls of the past.

Happy in a million ways, the creamy spiciness of Mom’s pumpkin pie. But living elsewhere, nevertheless.

But how about this real person also from Tennessee, Michael Reneau, managing editor of The Dispatch and Dispatch Faith? He celebrated Thanksgiving by leaving his home in Tennessee, his family’s home for generations.

 Instead, he spent the holiday at his sister-in-law’s home in Florida. And on impulse, got a tattoo.

Here’s the story: Begin by saying he is not exactly a young Marine waking up from a hangover with a strange woman in his bed and a mysterious tattoo on his arm.  

Reneau is a 36-year-old self-described Christian and nerd. He drives a minivan that got him, his wife and their four children to Florida. A dad-jokester who goes to bed right after his kids. For sure, not, as he says, the stereotypical person who gets tatted up.

But he does. On his arm he now has a very detailed replica of a skillet his mother used, as did her mother before her.

The tattoo was his holiday commemoration of his roots and his family. The frying pan is a reminder of family meals and time together. It’s also, as he puts it, “a reminder of the sort of matriarchal strength my mother and grandmothers exhibited when met with pain and loss and grief and the ugliness of the world.”

Profound rootedness from far away while visiting another part of his family hundreds of miles away.

Two Hawaiʻi Songs About Home

Kapono Beamer’s song, “Honolulu City Lights,” having a last cigarette before boarding that midnight flight, still brings tears to my eyes.

“Each time Honolulu city lights

Stir up memories in me.

Each night Honolulu city lights

Bring me back again.”

But it’s not about coming home. It’s about leaving home. As sad as he is to leave every time, he leaves every time because he lives somewhere else. Home in Hawaiʻi is a beacon, but it does not draw him back to stay.

Then thereʻs this: 

“Waikīkī

My whole life is empty without you

I miss that magic about you

Magic beside the sea

Magic of Waikīkī”

When Andy Cummings (born one year after my father and Como) wrote that beautiful song, he was inspired by his cold, snowy walk back to his hotel where he was playing a Polynesian revue gig in Lansing, Michigan.

He longed for Hawaiʻi. He also knew he would be back home there soon. Off with the galoshes, on with the …

No doubt his sentiment was real. But he also had a place in Honolulu. He was a working musician here as well as a working musician all over the world.

He could, and did, come and go.

They Have Lives Elsewhere

Home in Hawaiʻi is like a lot of things we think about this place. We wish for it to be simple and clear when in fact the idea of home becomes more complex over time.

The holiday season here is so much about variety and movement — from internet to interfaith, from longing to belonging. Your Las Vegas relatives coming home for a holiday reunion, then leaving just a few days after that big Christmas dinner. Or maybe spending Christmas with them in that Sin City.

Very, very little about family coming back for good. Longing or not, their lives are not empty without that.

They have full lives somewhere else with mementos, symbols and rituals lovingly reminding them of a place that once was their home but will never be again.

The holidays are a reminder that when it comes to living in Hawaiʻi, we think too much about roots and too little about branches.

Happy holidays, everybody, wherever you may roam. Or if you celebrate in place with your parents, the cousins you grew up with, and friends you’ve known since junior ROTC.

Or be home for Christmas, if only in your dreams. And maybe with a commemorative tattoo — which would look like what?