Going home for the holidays is always stressful. You have to pack up, clean, and throw out food that will expire over the month you’re away. If you live in the dorms, you have to do all of this within a certain period of time. While you’re undoubtedly excited to be going somewhere that you don’t have to pay to do laundry or pay for the food, you’re also exhausted. This is true for almost every college student. Even going home for Thanksgiving is a mess, and that’s only for a week. You expect to go home, unpack, and relax until next semester—but you don’t always get what you expected. Don’t worry though, sometimes the unexpected is something great!
Look at my Thanksgiving break, for example; I got engaged! My boyfriend and I went out to get our Christmas tree and when we got home, he got it set up in the stand and the lights strung on it. Then, he put the wires in the bulbs so I could hang them. While I was putting them up, he handed me an ornament that didn’t match the rest of them. I won’t lie, at first, I was pouty. It was a plain white bulb and the rest of our ornaments were red and gold. But then I turned it around and it said: Engaged. Definitely not what I was expecting to happen over my break. I figured I would be in my stretchy pants eating as much mac-n-cheese as I could, but instead I went all around town and even out of town to show off my new ring. Here’s a shameless look at my ring and the ornament!
Of course, some of the unexpected isn’t going to be great. Once you finally get home after a way-too-many-hours-long drive, you’re going to want to plop on your bed. Instead, your family members that you haven’t seen in a while are all going to want to see you. So, you prepare yourself for visiting hour. Will you get to rest after that? Probably, since they most likely won’t leave for hours and you’ll want to go to sleep. But then you wake up the next day, and the fanfare of your arrival is no longer playing. You aren’t royalty, after all. Laundry will need to be done, your old room will no doubt need dusted, and now you’re being faced with a true dilemma: no Christmas gifts have been bought and you have no money to buy them. Next thing you know you’re standing behind a checkout counter during the busiest shopping month of the year.
Don’t worry though! You’re at home and there are no rapidly approaching due dates. Your family is all around and you’re visiting with friends that you haven’t seen for months. Best of all, it’s the holidays. So push through the bad stuff, relax when you can, and don’t forget to order your books for next semester!