Hassall-Free Fridays | Home for the holidays?

Thanksgiving is now behind us, and finals beckon. Then it’s winter break, and we have an insanely short holiday to enjoy before more school. As students, the holidays raise important questions: Do I go home? How do I spend my time? Most importantly, what traditions do I observe? As I wind down my senior year, I believe more and more that it’s time to leave childhood ways behind me, and begin forging my own path.

Although Thanksgiving poses many of the same issues, the shorter time frame makes a decision easier for some of us. Traveling to New Zealand takes the better part of a full day, making it impractical to do over such a short break. Add to that the fact that Thanksgiving isn’t actually celebrated there, and there’s little incentive to pay several thousand dollars for the plane tickets. So I took the opportunity to build on my own traditions.

But the decision to stray from home is harder over winter break. Though break is still pitifully brief, Penn does give us enough time for all students to return home, and most of us do. We board our planes and suffer through our dates with the TSA, returning to old rooms and familiar beds.

The case for heading home is an easy one. Nursing junior Seble Gurmesa told me that the holidays were a time during which she could enjoy cherished family traditions. You can spend time with family and friends. You can have yourself a very merry nostalgia trip and let your mind wander back to the memories of years gone by. Combine these benefits with the more coercive factor of parental nagging, and you’ve got some fairly ironclad reasoning. It’s easy to slide back into that old role, play your part in the family tableau, whatever it may be, and be the kid your family knows you to be.

But you’re not a kid anymore. More than anything else, college is about growing up. It’s a funeral and baptism rolled into one, as the adult you will become is born and the child you were ceases to exist. That person your family knows isn’t really you anymore, and there’s no point in maintaining the fantasy. Your parents are adults — they can cope.

More to the point, the things your family does for the holidays today won’t last forever. Sooner or later your cousins are going to stop turning up, your aunts and uncles will follow their children and your grandparents will play favorites on where to go. If you’re not careful, you’ll end up weird Uncle Jerry, scaring your brother’s kids every December.

So start anew and pick your own traditions. Do the things you want to do instead of the things you’ve always done. Know that they needn’t have anything to do with what you’ve done in the past. Odds are, you don’t really enjoy at least a few of your family’s typical holiday activities, and there’s no reason to keep them up. Eat pasta at Ruby Tuesday instead of turkey at home. Embrace the new and revel in the fact that the things you do today are the traditions you will cherish tomorrow. We are now of the age when we can pick for ourselves the things our own children will one day rebel against. Don’t miss the opportunity to be original.

This Christmas, I’ll be disregarding my own advice. I get precious few opportunities to head home, and I don’t know when I’ll be able to next year. Seble told me of the holidays: “I love it because it’s a chance to see my entire family together.” A wise point.

But though I’ll be indulging this year, that doesn’t mean I don’t realize that it’s time to move on.

Luke Hassall is a College senior from Auckland, New Zealand. His e-mail address is hassall@theDP.com. Hassall-Free Fridays appears on alternate Fridays.

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