As a college freshman this is the first time I will ever be returning home for the holidays. I’ve never had to do this before. I’ve always just been home and the whole notion of finding flights and fighting traffic has been foreign for me. My family is very tight knit and lives within around 20 minutes of each other so the only times we had trouble getting from my house to my grandparents house was when my dad forgot the stuffing. And yet here I am packing to go home, planning my drive and praying there isn’t any traffic.Â
Coming home for the first time is weird. I’m excited to see everyone and yet I feel like there is so much that I’ve missed and so much that my parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles have missed that there’s a divide between us now. I am the estranged college student living her life and meeting new people and experiencing things that I’ve never experienced before and my family is living their own lives and experiencing their own things. No longer do I feel intertwined with these people. I feel like a stranger in my own home. I find myself becoming increasingly nostalgic for Thanksgiving just last year where I was coming in with full knowledge of what was going on in my family’s life. Now the holidays aren’t just a time to catch up with family I haven’t seen in a while, it’s a time to catch up with the people closest to me, who know me the best.Â
And yet, despite all this I still find myself happy being away from home. Returning home for the holidays is new and strange and a little sad because I’m growing up and becoming my own person but at the same time that’s what makes it so exciting. I can’t wait to tell everyone about my experiences in college, the new things I’ve tried and the classes I’ve taken, the friends I’ve made. I look forward to returning to old traditions and maybe making new ones here. And maybe for once it will be nice to complain about the traffic because as a New Englander I do like to complain.This new experience is hard but it’s also fun and it may never get easier but there really is no place like home for the holidays.