College makes me feel so weird, especially around the holidays. You don’t get to have enough time to fully feel prepared for the holidays, because you come home either right in the middle of them, or a few days before them. And by the time you get home, you feel really weird and out of it because your finals screwed your brain up badly, and you feel like you have no functioning parts of your body that can work together. I thought this strange holiday feeling would go away after the first year, but unfortunately it did not. Things feel so weird being in college because on campus it’s like living in a bubble. You barely see any Christmas lights, you don’t hear much Christmas music unless it’s Santacon or if you’re driving around in your car in between errands, and you don’t get a chance to even think about family time until you’re with said family. And don’t even get me started on Christmas shopping. You’ll never have time to shop at school during finals so don’t try to tell yourself you’ll get your shopping done before going home. You’ll just have to take advantage of Kohl’s being open 24 hours the last few days before the holiday, and buy a whole bunch of gift bags to save time on wrapping.

Being home for the holidays is also so weird because you have to play the really intense catch up game with your friends from home, and your family- most likely telling them all different versions of the same thing. To your family you’ll say: “School is busy, it’s really challenging but it’s great!”, to your friends you’ll say something more like “this semester was really hard and I feel like I'm dying, but I hope it’s all worth it in the end”. And everyone you tell will understand precisely what you mean. You’ll find yourself having more and more conversations that feel like ones you would have as an adult. Then the reality hits you that you’ve got a foot in the doorway to adulthood, and now you have to pretend you care how every other college student you know is doing in school, and how their semester went, but you’re still stressing about having to wait for your own grades to come in. You have to find the right words to perfectly sum up the last 4 months, while still keeping it short, sweet, and entertaining. How borinnggggg.

And to make matters worse, you feel like you have to size up everyone else’s experiences because your semester was DEFINITELY the most stressful. Or it was definitely the most exciting and you just have to tell everyone the same thing. Trust me I'm guilty of this too. You have to make it feel like your semester was simultaneously the coolest, and the hardest semester of your life so that people are even a little interested in it for more than 2 seconds. You have to make it really interesting and really quick, and it’s so weird to be retelling your whole semester long struggles to someone you see once a year or less.

On a totally different note, college makes me feel so weird for the holidays, because I never know if I should unpack my bags or continue living out of them for the next 4 weeks, while destroying my room in the process. Upon moving out to college each year, I do some deep cleaning of my bedroom at home in order to make it feel like I'm leaving myself with a clean slate to come back home to. Then as soon as I get home, I tear apart all the drawers and drop everything where it falls. I'm typically too busy to even get a second in my room to do anything besides sleep and get dressed, because there’s so many people and things to see and take care of during the craziness of the holiday season.

Long story short, college makes things feel really weird, even when you’re not at school anymore. The holidays feel different, no matter how many traditions or typical things you do. You have adult responsibilities, and a list of people to buy presents for, and a who to do list that’s even longer than the things you had to take care of at school. You have to balance going back to work, seeing all your friends and family, buying presents, family parties, and so many other crazy odds and ends things. You can try to argue with me, but from this point on I’ve officially accepted that Christmas will continue to change as we grow older, and that’s something we’ll have to get used to. The change isn’t necessarily bad, it’s just a part of the life we live. So take notice of the little things and traditions that you enjoy, because although you may not realize it now, they will change. Appreciate the time you have with your family and friends, because before you know it you'll have to be back in college state of mind, thinking about deadlines and assignments.