With the semester now drawing to a close--or suffering a slow death, depending on your circumstances--the time has come to confront some serious stress: Christmas with your family. Sure, Christmas is supposed to be all about family togetherness, peace on earth, goodwill towards men, and other such nonsense, but were all familiar with the baffling ordeal that is the holiday season. After all, they dont call it the silly season for nothing. Certain aspects of the holidays never seem to change and somehow manage to broadside us year after year. We seem to forget, perhaps willfully, these challenges after each Christmas season and are doomed to repeat them year after year. For those who may have repressed last years holiday gauntlet, heres a quick reminder of what to expect:
Buying Gifts: Among the most challenging aspects of Christmas is dredging your imagination for gift ideas. If youre lucky, you have one of those families that assigns everyone only one family member to get a gift for, but most likely, youll have to get several gifts. This is easier if your family gives you lists of what theyd like, but very often they wont. Some of them, usually your Mom, will tell you oh, you dont have to get me anything. Yeah, right.
Once you have some ideas, youll need to make an expedition to the dreaded malls and department stores. If you were smart, you thought ahead and got your gifts early, avoiding the overcrowding of the stores in the final days and weeks before the Big Day. If youre not smart (like me), youll likely find yourself wandering the aisles of stores with all the other confused dopes, hoping to stumble upon the perfect gift while avoiding the ubiquitous sales staff. Good luck!
Travel: It always seems to be that those of us who can least afford to travel are the ones who end up doing the most of it. So, after buying a plane or bus ticket you can scarcely afford, you try to head out to the airport, but the bus doesnt go all the way to the terminal, and you end up walking the final twenty minutes. After waiting in line for several more minutes to check in, you get to spend the next hour waiting for the flights scheduled departure with nothing to do. Then you get to spend another hour waiting because the flights behind schedule. After finally getting on the plane, you arrive in Vancouver only to learn that you have missed your connection. You spend the next few minutes panicking before the airline finds you a spot on the next connection. Relax a little and call ahead to let the family know youll be arriving an hour late.
Once you get on a plane to your final destination, its inevitable that youll be in a window seat with two large people in the middle and aisle seats. Pray you wont need to use the bathroom during the flight. If youre flying WestJet, you get to hear the flight attendants make the same jokes for the umpteenth time while you ignore the safety demonstration. After the excitement of the takeoff (always the best part of a flight), you get to spend the rest of the flight staring at the tops of clouds, mentally preparing yourself for The Visit.
The Visit: The first couple of days of a visit with family you may not have seen for a year are always enjoyable. Being able to chat with siblings and parents without a long-distance bill involved or playing with your cute nephews is a novelty. The novelty eventually wears off. For those of us who are used to living alone, having people constantly around becomes a overwhelming. Young childrens endless energy and noise, their boundless egocentrism, the twenty-five consecutive screenings of Toy Story all lead to toddler overload. The adults are only marginally better, especially if you happen to be the baby of the family, in which case you will always be the baby, no matter how old you are. Your parents and older siblings will talk to you as though you were a teenager again, and the whole family will start to regress into its old patterns, hopefully without the old sibling rivalry. Youll fall into these patterns yourself, and eventually take your old role in the family; years of independent living, working, and learning have just gone out the window.
Fortunately, your parents will have a well-stocked bar that will help take the edge off several times over the holidays.
Christmas morning arrives and when you emerge from your room the kids will have already opened several gifts. They will have scattered the living room with wrapping paper and boxes, which they will find at least as interesting as their toys. This will be one of the Christmas moments that you truly enjoy, as the kids enthusiasm brings back memories of your own. Youll open your own gifts, but it just wont be the same as when you were a kid. Youll watch the kids play with their plethora of new toys, which are always far cooler than the ones we had when we were kids, and help your brother-in-law assemble the more complex toys as your sister pitches boxes and spent wrapping paper out the door.
More relatives will arrive for Christmas dinner, squishing far too many people into too small a space. Not everyone will fit at the table; some will have to eat at the kitchen counter on bar stools, awkwardly passing the dishes between them and the table. The kids will eat one of the items on their plates and refuse to eat anything else. The adults will get more and more silly during dinner, and eventually everyone will be stuffed with turkey and too tired to clean up, leaving a mound of dirty dishes for Boxing Day. Slowly, the other visiting relatives will leave and everyone will wander off to bed
Youll spend a few more days stuffing yourself with Christmas treats, putting on weight youll spend the next three months trying to take off, playing with the kids, and being treated like a kid yourself by your elder relatives. This regression will begin to reverse itself as soon as you get dressed to make the trip home.
Travelling Home: Repeat the travel section above, only backwards, and this time the airline will lose your luggage and youll have to walk to the bus-stop in the rain.
Now youre ready to survive another Christmas. Youll be happy to know that the vacation does eventually end and you can finally get some relaxation with a nice leisurely 100% course load. Happy holidays!
***************************
I'm off to Calgary. see y'all in the New Year!
Buying Gifts: Among the most challenging aspects of Christmas is dredging your imagination for gift ideas. If youre lucky, you have one of those families that assigns everyone only one family member to get a gift for, but most likely, youll have to get several gifts. This is easier if your family gives you lists of what theyd like, but very often they wont. Some of them, usually your Mom, will tell you oh, you dont have to get me anything. Yeah, right.
Once you have some ideas, youll need to make an expedition to the dreaded malls and department stores. If you were smart, you thought ahead and got your gifts early, avoiding the overcrowding of the stores in the final days and weeks before the Big Day. If youre not smart (like me), youll likely find yourself wandering the aisles of stores with all the other confused dopes, hoping to stumble upon the perfect gift while avoiding the ubiquitous sales staff. Good luck!
Travel: It always seems to be that those of us who can least afford to travel are the ones who end up doing the most of it. So, after buying a plane or bus ticket you can scarcely afford, you try to head out to the airport, but the bus doesnt go all the way to the terminal, and you end up walking the final twenty minutes. After waiting in line for several more minutes to check in, you get to spend the next hour waiting for the flights scheduled departure with nothing to do. Then you get to spend another hour waiting because the flights behind schedule. After finally getting on the plane, you arrive in Vancouver only to learn that you have missed your connection. You spend the next few minutes panicking before the airline finds you a spot on the next connection. Relax a little and call ahead to let the family know youll be arriving an hour late.
Once you get on a plane to your final destination, its inevitable that youll be in a window seat with two large people in the middle and aisle seats. Pray you wont need to use the bathroom during the flight. If youre flying WestJet, you get to hear the flight attendants make the same jokes for the umpteenth time while you ignore the safety demonstration. After the excitement of the takeoff (always the best part of a flight), you get to spend the rest of the flight staring at the tops of clouds, mentally preparing yourself for The Visit.
The Visit: The first couple of days of a visit with family you may not have seen for a year are always enjoyable. Being able to chat with siblings and parents without a long-distance bill involved or playing with your cute nephews is a novelty. The novelty eventually wears off. For those of us who are used to living alone, having people constantly around becomes a overwhelming. Young childrens endless energy and noise, their boundless egocentrism, the twenty-five consecutive screenings of Toy Story all lead to toddler overload. The adults are only marginally better, especially if you happen to be the baby of the family, in which case you will always be the baby, no matter how old you are. Your parents and older siblings will talk to you as though you were a teenager again, and the whole family will start to regress into its old patterns, hopefully without the old sibling rivalry. Youll fall into these patterns yourself, and eventually take your old role in the family; years of independent living, working, and learning have just gone out the window.
Fortunately, your parents will have a well-stocked bar that will help take the edge off several times over the holidays.
Christmas morning arrives and when you emerge from your room the kids will have already opened several gifts. They will have scattered the living room with wrapping paper and boxes, which they will find at least as interesting as their toys. This will be one of the Christmas moments that you truly enjoy, as the kids enthusiasm brings back memories of your own. Youll open your own gifts, but it just wont be the same as when you were a kid. Youll watch the kids play with their plethora of new toys, which are always far cooler than the ones we had when we were kids, and help your brother-in-law assemble the more complex toys as your sister pitches boxes and spent wrapping paper out the door.
More relatives will arrive for Christmas dinner, squishing far too many people into too small a space. Not everyone will fit at the table; some will have to eat at the kitchen counter on bar stools, awkwardly passing the dishes between them and the table. The kids will eat one of the items on their plates and refuse to eat anything else. The adults will get more and more silly during dinner, and eventually everyone will be stuffed with turkey and too tired to clean up, leaving a mound of dirty dishes for Boxing Day. Slowly, the other visiting relatives will leave and everyone will wander off to bed
Youll spend a few more days stuffing yourself with Christmas treats, putting on weight youll spend the next three months trying to take off, playing with the kids, and being treated like a kid yourself by your elder relatives. This regression will begin to reverse itself as soon as you get dressed to make the trip home.
Travelling Home: Repeat the travel section above, only backwards, and this time the airline will lose your luggage and youll have to walk to the bus-stop in the rain.
Now youre ready to survive another Christmas. Youll be happy to know that the vacation does eventually end and you can finally get some relaxation with a nice leisurely 100% course load. Happy holidays!
***************************
I'm off to Calgary. see y'all in the New Year!
VIEW 3 of 3 COMMENTS
tiamat:
merry x-mas!!! safe travelling. 
fox1:
good luck. happy new year.