GOING to my roommate's for Thanksgiving was really fun -- with my small family, I had never experienced the phenomenon of eating the traditional meal with 15 other people. But then I woke up the next morning and felt immediately homesick when I saw her mom putting up the family Christmas tree.
Every year my family goes to a tree farm and selects a real tree. But when you don't get home until Dec. 19, it's impossible to participate in that ritual. When we go off to college, both the craziness of exams and the distance from home tempt us to blow off the holiday season. In reality, though, starting our celebrations before we get home helps us to preserve the importance of our respective holidays and keep our sanity in the process.
The Christmas season was a "season" in the religious sense long before retailers made it a shopping season. In the church calendar, the four weeks before Christmas are celebrated as Advent a time of joyful anticipation before the birth of Jesus.
As a small child I loved this season because of the lighting of the Advent candles each week at church, the fact that we sang Christmas songs for four weeks, and those cute little Advent calendars, with a piece of candy for each day. Now I'm in college and as much as I love the Advent season, I consistently miss church until the last Sunday, when exams are done and I'm home. As a result, I feel cheated out of something important.
It's not just that I feel guilty for not going to church, although I do. But it's also the fact that the church during Advent calls us to slow down a little and think about what we have done or not done in the past year and how we can change our lives for the better in the New Year. The fact that it's difficult to be reflective at this time of year makes it all the more necessary to take a little time out, and figure out our motivation for working so hard.
Even though I don't have time to recreate my family's Christmas tree tradition, there are still fun little things to do to keep from missing home too much. The joy of leaving first-year dorms is that you actually have a kitchen, and so I celebrated accordingly by making my mom's ice cream pies for my friends and myself.
Do I really have time to make Oreo cookie piecrusts and chocolate fudge sauce? Considering all the work I have to do, probably not. And most of us probably don't have time to go Christmas shopping for our school friends.
But unlike exams, where you can study feverishly and still walk out wondering how you did, making food and selecting presents bring a sense of accomplishment, a finished product you can point to. After all, there is nothing more damaging to your sanity than thinking that you have run around all week for exams and have nothing to show for the trouble.
Preparing for the holidays now also makes it more fun to jump right in when you get home. When you have exams until the last day and totally immerse yourself in the meantime, as I did my first year, it makes you feel almost like Rip Van Winkle after a long nap. While you've been studying, the rest of the world has been shopping, baking, singing, decorating and just plain enjoying themselves. Suddenly you have only a few days left to enjoy the most fun time of the year before the Christmas tree comes down, which I personally find one of the saddest days of the year.
The more cynical of you are rolling your eyes and saying, "Getting sad over taking down Christmas trees is cheesy." And you're probably right. But that's the great thing about Christmas: It's the one time of year where it's okay to be cheesy, to indulge the child in all of us who still ooh's and aah's over the pretty lights and loves to rip open the pretty packages. Why wait until exams are over? Making a little room for celebration now means having Christmas in two places.
I've given up on actually being that child again, when I didn't have to think about exams, jobs or Christmas dinner making me fat. But I do like to revisit that inner child sometimes, and oddly enough I've found that it's much easier to do with my friends at college than in my own home. Exchanging stories of Christmas past, whether funny or wistful, teaches you things about your friends that you would never guess otherwise.
Everybody hates exams, but it's not worth ruining your holidays. Take a little time out to enjoy the wonders of your own holiday, whether it's Christmas, Hanukkah or Ramadan. Eat, drink and be merry with the people you care about. Do at least one serious thing and one cheesy thing.
(Elizabeth Managan is a Cavalier Daily columnist.)
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