I have celebrated five holidays already this fall - Halloween, three of my roommates' birthdays and Thanksgiving - and I am eagerly awaiting Christmas. The point of this column is to offer you, from the perspective of an experienced holiday celebrator, the best ways to celebrate these holidays in college when they come around again.
The first thing to remember is that Halloween for a college student is still all about the costume and the candy. The difference is that the cute costumes that they sell at Party Depot will not fit you anymore, and you are left with the limited selection of adult costumes for $49.99 each. Do not despair! You're a college student, and Halloween is challenging you to piece together a sensational costume with all of the resources that you can find. Next year, when you go home for Fall Break, scour your house for those fish-net tights that you just had to buy in seventh grade, the spandex shorts that were once part of your high school track, crew or volleyball uniform, and the extra large T-shirt that you got from summer camp when they ran out of smalls. When you get back to Grounds, put together your costume, wear it to Halloween parties and wear its G-rated version to Trick-or-Treat on the Lawn.
If it's your roommate's birthday, then it's your job to plan the celebration. For Operation Decoration, hit up the local party store, buy two rolls of streamers in your roommate's favorite colors and string them across the room - when your roommate is gone, of course. For Operation Celebration, buy a cake, and find a candle and a lighter. I learned that Kroger has surprisingly good cakes - the red velvet cake was deliciously sweet, and the sheet cake was perfectly moist, which explains why it disappeared in two days flat. If you go down the ice-cream cake route, call ahead to Arch's because cakes quickly run out that haven't been pre-ordered. Now even if you have all of the supplies, you can't celebrate until you have all of the people. As my roommates and I realized, there is almost no time of day when all of us are in our apartment at the same time, which is why we ended up celebrating my roommate's birthday for ten minutes - from 11:50 p.m. to 12:00 a.m. - on her actual day of birth. If you want to have cake as dessert - not as a midnight snack - I'd recommend that you set a time after dinner at which to celebrate. If you really do want cake as a midnight snack, why, that's what seconds are for. If you are the best roommate ever, then you can spray paint Beta Bridge in honor of the birthday.
For Thanksgiving, plan a full Thanksgiving dinner with all of your roommates on the weekend before Thanksgiving Break. Assign each dish of the meal - turkey, potatoes, stuffing, squash and pumpkin pie - to a different person. When you sit down to eat, be thankful for a nice home-cooked meal with roommates and don't compare instant mashed potatoes to your mom's light, fluffy ones, or the store-bought pumpkin pie to your grandma's home-made one, crust and all. Embrace new Thanksgiving traditions. If your roommate melts marshmallows on the yams or dollops cottage cheese on the potatoes, give it a try! And if you want to take the celebration to a whole new level of sophistication, get some wine glasses and red wine for a toast.
Now Christmas is fast approaching, and you still have plenty of time to make your college Christmas of 2010 a memorable one. Buy a fake mini Christmas tree and order each of your roommates to get ornaments for it. String up some colorful lights in the window. If you're feeling really ambitious, you can even buy stockings and organize a Secret Santa gift exchange. If you're really fed up with your roommate by then, you can always put coal in her stocking. The best part is that you can actually celebrate the holidays twice, if you celebrate them first in college with your roommates and then at home with your family.
Sheila's column runs biweekly Fridays. She can be reached at s.bushman@cavalierdaily.com.
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