So by the time you are reading this, I'll have just finished my first day back on campus this spring. I'm a freshman, so it's kinda like being dropped back into the big deep blue ocean of adulting. At least, that's what I thought was going to happen. But let's start a little bit farther back, during the carefree, indulgent season of Winter Break.
Over the first three or four days, my family had guests over, which was...quite an experience. We don't normally entertain since we're a small family with a medium-sized home near a college town that is dead in the winter. The family friends we were hosting had two daughters, ages 12 and 5. I grew up with the 12-year-old, so we were able to get along really well and had some great and interesting conversations. At one point, we were forced to sing together (if you know me, you know I love performing, but that I also have stage fright so...) which was simultaneously horrifying and kind of adorable. With the 5-year-old though, I kind of had to switch gears.
With little kids in general, you have to be the most outgoing, expressive, animated version of yourself as possible- otherwise, you end up with an awkward tension and a "youngin" that doesn't want anything to do with you. I spent a little while trying to figure out how to entertain both of the girls and ended up with a few options: Christmas cookie baking, Carrom Board (where are my Desi peeps at?), and an animated movie. Well, early on in the guest-hosting, I ruled out number three because the guests had some judgmental opinions on media entertainment, so I didn't want to risk it. In other words, I didn't want to be the stereotypical teen on her laptop...even though I needed to get some work done.
I went with cookies first, and it was an absolute blast. However, because I had never baked Christmas cookies before, I was kind of lost when the dough kept crumbling and I may or may not have forgotten to get icing materials. I did improvise and melt some peppermint Hershey kisses though- the ultimate chocolate for the ultimate cookie decorating. And my poor fingers hurt after many many rounds of teaching and playing Carrom Board, but it was super fun regardless. A quick little blurb about carrom board: it's a sport-based Indian table game where the object is to flick a striker disk with your finger and move lighter disks into one of four corner pockets, kind of like billiards but more "hands-on". I would include a picture but I couldn't find a perfect one that was free so...here's a link to a video instead.
We definitely felt the ultimate level of exhaustion by the time those ten first days of the break were over. For the rest of break, I spent a few days catching up with friends who came back home- oh, I forgot to mention that I go to college in the same town I've lived in for 16 years or so. All my other friends chose schools at least an hour away though, so it's a big deal when they come home. Our friend group usually plans group meals at restaurants or baking/cooking/game night/movie parties at someone's house and we spend several days just hanging around each other. This time around, we had a "Christmas Cookie/Crazy Rich Asians Party", with the movie being pirated of course. We also made delicious hot cocoa and posed for super aesthetic Snaps. Now, as I covered in a previous article, my family doesn't really celebrate Christmas so I had never made Christmas sugar cookies before we had those guests over. We almost burned them...well, we actually did. But this time, we actually had icing bags and the whole shebang. What matters though is not that the cookies were kinda gross but that we had fun. Wow. I made that sound really cheesy. It was a great moment for me at least.
After the initial holiday experience, I traveled up to New Jersey with my parents and spent the rest of break there. I would compare my time there to maybe voluntarily going to a deserted island, with the necessary things for survival still handy though. It was absolutely amazing to be around family after having been thoroughly drained emotionally during my first semester at college. I had everything essential for my entertainment until the end of the year: my phone and my laptop. We went out for a lot of good Indian food because there's absolutely none in Athens (none, I promise you) and I probably gained my weight in chicken 65 and naan, but it's fiiiiiine. I did try to balance it out by "working out" and by that, I mean an hour of mixed ten-pound-weight lifting, stretches, and elliptical/treadmill work. Maybe I went a little too much hardcore on the holiday relaxing. But it was exactly what my brain and body needed. Here's to hoping I can put that bank of energy I gained over the break to work over this coming semester.
