Positive side of holidays at home

IF YOU’RE GOING home this holiday season — don’t fool yourself, it’s winter break — your three weeks are sure to be filled with family and frustration.

Family: owing to the nature of the holidays; frustration: owing to the nature of family.

But this really works in your favor.

Chances are, you just spent either 16 grueling weeks working at school with all its stress.

If not, you spent that time slacking off, but not so much that you drop into academic probation.

Either way, going home to the loving arms of mom, dad and kid sister might not quite be the reprieve you’ve always wanted.

There’s nothing like being reprimanded for sleeping in, drinking too much milk out of the fridge or staying up later than the rest of the family.

Where other than home sweet home can you find there’re plenty of places you’d rather be?

Now try adding a work schedule on to that already over-stressed family time.

If you’ve been in college for more than a semester you already know this, but I’ll say it anyway: you’re not going to have much time for relaxation when you go home.

Between work, family traditions and other annual obligations, you’re going to have your docket pretty full before you bubble in your last scantron.

But I think three weeks of friction is worth it.

It’s because I dislike the immediate loss of freedom so much that I cherish my holiday vacations.

I soul search for a bit, and every time I remind myself of a little something that really makes me happy: not being home.

Every time I face family drama, I think of my former freedom and the memory of college life fills me with some sort of bliss, happiness.

And so I’ve come to love being scolded.

There are fleeting moments where I really hate being back at home, stripped of all my newfound college freedoms, but my immediate reaction now is to build up how much I love college.

Every time I hear tone-deaf carolers butcher “Silent Night,” every time an argument breaks out over the dinner table between an teenaged sibling and a parent, every time we watch some soulless holiday special, it makes me love not being home all the more.

If the point of vacation is to have an extended time of happy relaxation, then I’ve never had a vacation in my life.

Fortunately, I think that a much more valuable vacation is the sort that makes you treasure the 49 ordinary, boring weeks in the year when you’re not surrounded by decadent holiday cheer.

After all, if you enjoy your winter vacation, you’re going to find yourself with 49 weeks in the year spent dismally in anticipation of the last three.

And what other than a miserable cataclysm of a winter break — all right, you win — can make you treasure the thought of going back to school?

I hope you have a horrible vacation. I look forward to mine.

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