Today is the last time my siblings and parents will celebrate Christmas in our family home. After 33 Christmases there, the place is up for sale and next year, it will be someone else’s home for the holidays.

Difficult as it is to see that 1920s colonial home pass from our hands, the change isn’t a surprise to anyone in my family. For the past decade, my parents have lived there alone, since their six children are grown and have homes of their own. These days, the house is more of a central meeting spot, the last big symbol of the life we once shared, and a place we all still can go to be together — to see Mom and Dad, to watch a Notre Dame football game, to eat a meal or to drop off the grandchildren.

In the good old days, our family filled the house to every corner. We slept two and three to a room, and there was never enough space under our massive Christmas trees to hold all the gifts.

When my grandfather died in 1970, my grandmother came to live with us, too. At one point, we had four generations living under the same roof. When we all get together now, the total head count exceeds 25.

But at this point, the house is too big for my parents. It needs daily maintenance, and none of us lives close enough to help with the chores. Plus the neighborhood has become dangerous, and my folks’ eyes and ears aren’t as sharp as they were those years when we kids were trying to sneak in — or out — at night without being heard. So they’ve decided to move into a retirement community where they can split their time between a small apartment in the city and a little beach house on the coast.

Although none of my five siblings has brought up the topic, I know we’re thinking about the same things as we all travel from our homes to meet once more at Mom and Dad’s on Christmas Eve. We’ll be wondering what it will feel like next year when we have to find someplace else large enough to hold both us and our expectations for the bigness of our family’s Christmas spirit.

I can’t wait to reminisce with my sister about all the nights we practiced tiptoeing down the staircase noiselessly so that on Christmas morning we could do it without waking anyone. She used to tuck an alarm clock under her pillow and then give me a shake when 4 a.m. rolled around. We’d get downstairs, plug in the tree and go to town opening presents. It was dark and quiet and safe and exciting — there in the living room with only the glow of the tree lighting our ways. We’d dump our stockings and fill our mouths with chocolate Santas and ribbon candy and clear-toy lollipops.

And just as the sun threw its first beam across the city, I’d run unpstairs where my parents were in a deep sleep — having been up half the night preparing the gifts.

“Look, Ma. Look what Santa brought me!” I’d say and hold up a pair of red plastic high-heel shoes or a new dress for my Barbie Doll. A warm arm would come from beneath the covers, and I’d get a hug and a sense that all was calm, all was bright.

When I decided to go home for Christmas this year, I phoned my mother and asked if we were going to have stockings. They were, after all, the best part of Christmas because my mother was a master at finding strange little items that were fun or tasty or exotic. No stocking since has matched the ones my mother stuffed when we were kids.

“No, dear,” she said. “I gave all the kids their stockings years ago. You know that. Don’t you have your stocking?”

Of course I have my stocking, but I wanted her to stuff it, fill it right to the jingly bells around the top and hang it on the mantel and leave it there for me to find Christmas morning. Early.

In that moment, I realized how lucky I’ve been. All these years, I have been able to go home again — even when I wasn’t with my parents. Once the house is gone next year and my parents are settled into their new place, I’ll still be able to go home. In some essential way, isn’t that what Christmas is about? Not houses or trees or gifts or even mangers. But about being able to go home in your heart.