© Lisa McKay 2007 - All rights reserved

What is it about being somewhere different that breeds the need to capture something we can carry with us when we leave?

The root of “souvenir” is the verb “to remember”, and the word has come to refer to keepsakes of sentimental value that remind one of past events. Despite the fact that stores selling mostly snow globes and magnets have managed to cheapen this French contribution to the global vocabulary almost beyond use, I still can’t quite let it go. I must admit that I love souvenirs. At their best, they are so much more than things. They are pebbles picked up along the path of life. They are reminders that this path stretches far beyond my living room.

This admission should not be taken to indicate a wholehearted abandonment of all pretension or my endorsement of plastic shot glasses and cheesy tee shirts. To the contrary, I consider my tastes to be highly refined. I may not be able to consistently assemble a trendy outfit, but I am an expert on what constitutes a good souvenir.

This expertise was gained the old-fashioned way – practice, practice, practice. As a wee child I started by collecting “things” - marble boxes inlaid with lapis from India, rhinos carved out of malachite from Zimbabwe, bronze windmills from Amsterdam, wooden elephants from South Africa… By the time I was ready to leave home and head for University my bedroom looked like a miniature inanimate petting zoo had wandered into a Ten Thousand Villages display. As I packed box after box I decided that two new qualities needed to guide my souvenir collecting – a consistent theme, and portability.

So, in what I now see as a delayed “girl scout” phase, I started collecting patches. As a little girl I would have loved to belong to a club like Awanas or Girl Scouts that awarded patches for doing things like setting fires, memorizing Bible verses, and reading 5,000 books (especially if that club had awarded patches by mail, so I didn’t actually have to interact with any other children to participate). Instead of a club, however, I got the occasional family-cockroach-massacre in Dhaka where we competed to see who could amass the biggest pile of carcasses, and spent many hours on my belly in the dirt with my siblings trying to sneak around the entire perimeter of our five acre garden in Harare without the family dogs discovering what we were up to.

Perhaps if some caring soul had awarded me patches to recognize outstanding achievements in cockroach hunting and canine evasion then, I would not have had to spend time working through this phase as an adult. But no one did. So in a spectacular demonstration of resilience and a valiant effort to redress this neglect, I decided to start awarding patches to myself as souvenirs of my travels.

For six years I collected these small, sew-on, mementos to mark places I’d been - Cape Canaveral in Florida, Saint Maartens in The Caribbean, Queenstown in New Zealand… I collected some great patches, but none came close to the one Matt, my little brother, scored in Indonesia around the time the Soeharto government was overthrown in 1998 and before my family were evacuated to Singapore during the May riots. This patch, the symbol of the Indonesian Democratic party, said PDI-P and even came ready mounted on its own red vest, the vests worn by millions of protesters in Jakarta as they demonstrated against the Suharto government. I tried repeatedly to talk Matt into giving me this souvenir, arguing that he’d had the privilege of living through the actual coup so it was only fair that he share the mere symbols with those of us who were stuck in Australia and missed all the action. But he wouldn’t. He hung this vest up in his college room beside the Indonesian flag for years. Come to think of it, he was probably going through his own patch stage. 

The patches made pretty good souvenirs. The only real problem was that I didn’t have the faintest idea what to do with them. My original idea had been to sew them onto a pair of jeans, but this wasn’t exactly a durable showcase, and by my mid twenties I had also figured out that there were more flattering ways to draw attention to myself than displaying a spaceship on my butt.

So all I ended up with was a full shoebox, and that wasn’t good enough. They were portable alright, and themed. But when it came right down to it, I had to admit that I wasn’t collecting souvenirs just for my own private gratification. I wanted to be gratified in public. Part of the fun was enabling other people to appreciate my peripatetic lifestyle. Some might call this showing off. I like to think of it as sharing.

So after much thought I decided to switch tack and start collecting Christmas tree ornaments. This time I thought my reasoning was flawless. Christmas, after all, isn’t just about celebrating the birth of Jesus all by ourselves, in a corner somewhere. It’s usually about spending time with people we love, and remembering everything we have to be thankful for – those blessings that make our lives so rich in texture and meaning.

When you think about it like that, Christmas is partly about souvenirs. We’re even provided with a short-term, ready-made, display cabinet for all our keepsakes – a Christmas tree.

I’m still convinced it’s a great theory. The fact that I’m now 31 and have never had a Christmas tree of my own doesn’t negate that. Someday when I’m 90 and in assisted living perhaps I’ll turn the potted plant in the corner of my room into a Christmas tree. I can foresee all the fun I’ll have decorating it now…

Pawing through a box of ornaments, pulling one out at random, and examining a marshmallow wearing a red scarf and perched jauntily on skis… “Isn’t that just too cute! Where did I get that, again?”

Turning it over and reading the note attached to the bottom…“I went skiing in Colorado in 2002? Really? Well, I’ll be. I bet it was great! Nurse, did you know I went skiing in Colorado in 2002?”

This sobering vision of gratification so delayed it will surely have lost most of it’s meaning has recently prompted me to add a collection piece to my souvenirs strategy. Now, in addition to collecting holiday ornaments, I have decided to collect something I can also enjoy between now and the year 2066 - the holidays themselves.

This has required some serious thought, though. If I collect a holiday for every single place I visit, at my current rate of travel I will be celebrating some sort of holiday every day of the year in approximately three years and four months. Don’t get me wrong, I quite like the thought, but even I’m prepared to admit that it may not be, well, feasible. Some strict ground rules are clearly in order.

I don’t have much precedence to go on. The legislation governing global holiday collecting is scanty, so I’ve had to put my background in international human rights law to good use (just, I’m sure, as the University of Notre Dame hoped I would when they gave me that scholarship to take those courses) and drafted the first-ever convention on the Rights of International Holiday Collectors.

The preamble is long and somewhat tedious – lots of talk about the inherent dignity and inalienable right of all members of the human family to collect holidays – so I’ll jump straight to the relevant articles.

Article 14: The individual must live in the same country for at least six (cumulative) months before they are entitled to add one national holiday to their holiday souvenir collection.

Article 22: The individual is entitled to observe registered souvenir holidays in addition to any public holidays commonly observed in their country of residence.

According to this Convention I am entitled to collect one holiday each from Canada, Australia, Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, Indonesia, Croatia and the Philippines. My current personal (inter)national public holiday roster reads as follows:

oAustralia Day (January 26)

oInternational Mother Language Day (February 21)

oAfrica Day (May 25)

oCanada Day (July 1)

oAnti-fascists Resistance Day (June 22)

oEid ul-fitr (October, exact date varies, this holiday falls at the end of the ninth month of the Islamic lunar calendar following the month of Ramadan)

oAll Saints Day (November 1)

A lot of thought went into these selections. Collecting a holiday is a decision with lifelong implications, and I consider a number of different dimensions before finalizing my choice, including: the meaning of the holiday; where it falls on the calendar in relation to other collected holidays; distinctive national flavour; associated holiday food and traditions; and how cool the name of the holiday is. Sometimes the decision can take months.

One upcoming holiday-collecting decision, however, is already clear-cut. As I’ve now lived in the US for significantly more than six months, when I leave I’ll be entitled to collect a US holiday, and Thanksgiving will win hands down.

        It’s not just Thanksgiving food that gives this holiday the edge (although that alone might do it) it’s the meaning of the holiday. At its core, the Thanksgiving tradition was established by the Pilgrims as a time set aside after the harvest to honor God and give thanks for received blessings. Of all the holidays they celebrate, I think Americans have come closest to adhering to the original intent with this one.

There is a general sense of goodwill that seems to permeate the country for four days straight over this fourth weekend in November. It’s not the manic commercialized goodwill that accompanies Christmas, either. It’s reverent and reflective, focused mostly on sharing good food and good times with those you love.

Today is thanksgiving here, and I spent it with good friends in California. There was lots of eating – turkey, cranberry sauce, stuffing, beans, bread rolls, pumpkin pie – and a lot of laughing around the table after dinner over cards. Yet what I would consider my truest “Thanksgiving moment” didn’t come then.

It came washing the dishes.

        I used to hate washing the dishes. Some of the “growing up” memories of which I am least proud involve complaining about having to wash the dishes on the one day a week our Zimbabwean cook got off to spend with his family. But tonight the kitchen looked like a culinary bomb had detonated by the time we were done gorging ourselves, and there was no one but us to clean up the mess. As I reached for the sponge, poured soap onto it and passed it under the hot water, I was suddenly transported.

This happens occasionally. Walking under a jacaranda tree in bloom rarely fails to transform me momentarily into a 16 year old, stepping out the front door in Harare and headed for school, treading down the carpet of lavender that’s blanketed the driveway and the car overnight. Hearing Matchbox Twenty’s song “Unwell” takes me to the Philippines, onto the couch in our living room where I’m staring out over Manila and writing the final chapters of my first novel. Tonight, I was yanked back in time to my grandparent’s place, high in the Comboyne Mountains in Australia, 2 miles from the nearest neighbor. It’s dark outside, and I’m on clean-up duty. 

Next door to the kitchen is the pantry, full of roll-out cupboards taller than I can reach. The shelves are stacked with clear glass jars full of homemade jam, neatly labeled with Nana’s precise writing. Boisenberry (January 1989). Through the pantry is the screen door that leads out onto the side porch. Every night, after all the dishes and laughing and singing are done, all the cousins go out that door and step barefoot through the darkness down cool cement steps to the two big rooms below the house - the girl’s and boy’s dorms full of bunk beds. I don’t know about the others, but there is usually some small part of me wondering whether I will step on a snake or a blue-tongued lizard in the process.

In the kitchen the fire is still burning in the stove - the smell of wood smoke, the perfume of holidays. This fire was fed with rounds of wood from the porch, wood our dads have chopped for my grandparents. Sometimes they let us feed the fire, and wood wasn’t all we put in there. Leeches were the curse of summer. As a little child, seeing leeches hanging off my ankles, fat with my blood, was more fascinating than horrifying. The older I got, however, the scarier they became. Before setting out on a hike we would saturate our ankles and sneakers with spray, and I would spend a good portion of my time trying to figure out if it was a leech or my imagination squirming around in my shoe. If you were unlucky enough to pick up a leech around the house, the offended party usually squished it between two rocks, or tossed it into the fire. Personally, I favored the fire. The leech would make a small popping sound when it exploded, like a tiny living firework.  

I have 22 cousins and 14 aunts and uncles on that side of the family, and with that many people running around we always seemed to be preparing for a meal or cleaning up after one. The sheer number of dishes in Robin and Paul’s kitchen was what triggered this sudden sense-memory tonight. I even looked over my shoulder at the fridge, half-expecting to see the familiar holiday roster.

        It wasn’t there of course, but my family was – even if only in my mind. So was the sink that was just a tad too low, the wooden step-ladder that doubled as a perch for someone on dry-up, wet tea towels, and laughter – not always, but often – as we washed the dishes.

        All of this came to me in an instant as I passed a glass under hot running water and watched the soap bubbles slide off, taking their rainbows with them. The French, for once, have it right. As nice as wooden bowls made of cinnamon sticks and ebony candlesticks are, the object itself isn’t ultimately what’s important. It is the memories of these moments, and the laughter and emotions that they are attached too, that are the true treasures. And those memories adhere to all sorts of things in life – not just to bronze elephants, patches, and Christmas tree ornaments, but also to trees, songs, the smell of smoke, and the act of washing dishes.

        This reminder that I don’t need complicated or expensive souvenirs to ferry me down memory lane doesn’t mean I’m going to turf the Anatolian carpet I recently bought in Turkey, forego all those extra holidays I’m entitled to or, for that matter, volunteer to wash dishes at every upcoming social event. After all, there are new places to see, new things to do, and very important International Conventions to be ratified.

But tonight, at least, I was grounded in thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving that many of the precious souvenirs I carry down this path replay to a soundtrack of laughter and make me smile as they visit. 

And determination to pay a bit more attention to savoring today’s moments as they unfold. For it is these moments that will become tomorrow’s mementos, and to live them intentionally and remember them clearly will be to taste life twice.