Home for the Holidays

Image courtesy: Pinterest

As this semester comes to a close, and the new year rapidly approaches, I can’t help but shift my focus from studying to being home for the holidays. My mind also drifts to the disappearance of the trademark cheer I had been accustomed to.

To anyone that feels like the holidays aren’t what they used to be, I am right there with you. 

For years, the winter season consisted of trips to the Blue Ridge Mountains to visit my grandparents and extravagant Christmas celebrations (in true Filipino fashion). Throughout my childhood, seasonal excitement filled my heart with joyful anticipation. But when I entered my late teens, I could feel the enchantment slip away. 

Gone was the blissful comfort of lounging in a state of festivity. 

Now, I am forced to sit in a period of regeneration, reflecting on the misgivings of the past year. I cannot rely on routine snowfall to blanket my troubles, or Santa to give me renewed strength to withstand what’s to come in the next chapter of my life. Instead, I am gifted the painful inevitability of saying goodbye to another year of youth and yearning for second chances. 

Driving home from school is haunted by dreadful and melancholic awareness of my inability to turn the car around, and it is with a white-knuckle grip that I keep inching forward. I feel grief course through my veins, and I am riddled with memories and the aching understanding that life is a one-way road. A path to an existence dictated by some divine power that moves at a rapid pace. 

I can’t plead or pray my way back into the body of a wide-eyed girl whose only concern was the order in which the presents under the Chritstmas tree would be unwrapped.

I can’t stay at the Thanksgiving table alongside my cousins before they grow taller than me. 

I can’t freeze the clock at 11:59 p.m. on New Year’s Eve to relish in the delight of eternal friendships and new beginnings.

For the past couple of years, I have let myself fall into a state of nostalgia and wistful longing. 

This year, I am devoting my efforts to craft my own traditions and transform sorrow into an ode to winters departed. 

I have come to believe a key part in entering adulthood is the realization that it is upon ourselves to embrace each season of our lives – and then let them go. To grasp onto the past is to deny yourself the pleasures of the future – a lesson that emerges to me amidst a wintry haze.

Strike Out,

Mia Tanner

Editor: Anna Kadet 

Athens