Our warmest wishes for your holidays—and for feeling at home

Johan Leman, 8 July 2026

Summer brings to mind holidays, distant journeys, but also rest and the opportunity simply to be “at home” for a while. An oasis in the midst of a working year.

For first-generation migrants, summer often means returning, if only briefly, to their country of origin—the “home” where they were born. Yet as the years go by, and especially once children are part of the family, these visits become less and less frequent, particularly when parents wish to limit the trip to their village of origin.

For how long does one’s country of origin continue to represent “home”? And for whom? At what point, within the diaspora, does “home” become the place where one feels safest, where more relaxed relationships can develop?

In a super-diverse city such as Brussels, “home” can have many different meanings, even within the same family. For some young people, it is no longer the place that their father—and, to a lesser extent, their mother—still considers home. Instead, home may be a particular street, a neighbourhood square, or the youth centre where they spend much of their time.

For them, their father’s homeland may still exist as the place where the extended family occasionally gathers. Yet those reunions may just as easily take place somewhere else, for a wedding or a funeral.

Is “home” an objective reality that can be clearly defined? Or is it, above all, a feeling? And can it happen that someone comes to realise that they no longer have a place they truly call home, or may have more than one home?

In the face of such complexity, our heartfelt wish for everyone during this holiday season is that, alongside the joy of “getting away,” each person may also find time to experience a genuine sense of home: a state of complete ease, of feeling at peace with oneself rather than estranged from oneself. May everyone, whether far from home or in the place where they spend most of the year, be able to experience both realities as authentically as possible.

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