These next two months are often considered the busiest part of the entire school year. With internship application deadlines, midterms, study abroad applications and upcoming summer plans, it can be difficult to create time for yourself to relax. As I sit at my desk writing this article, my head is swimming with the plethora of assignments I need to complete before I can go to bed for the night — and it’s already 10 p.m.
When mentally strenuous times hit, I turn to the thing I love most: holidays.
Due to my deep belief in fairytales as a child, or the nostalgia that the holiday season brings as I leave my adolescence, I have always been enamored with the idea of beloved holiday icons. Nevertheless, even in my later years of high school, I always forced my entire family to celebrate multiple holidays with me throughout the year.
Valentine’s Day was never complete without a visit from Cupid. On New Year’s Day, Jack Frost was plastered across our kitchen windows with paper snowflakes. On Saint Patrick’s Day, my parents loved how I trashed the house and claimed, “That sneaky Leprechaun did it!”
My so-called “holiday antics” only got worse the day my dad approached me with the idea of excessively decorating for Halloween.
October became our electric bill’s worst nightmare. My dad and I constructed a giant “BOO” sign and graveyard out of chicken wire, securing it in the middle of our front yard. Homemade tombstones littered the lawn, while ghosts and witches dangled from the trees. Eventually, the decorations became so extravagant that trick-or-treaters started to take photos in our yard as if my front lawn had somehow become a haunted tourist attraction.
“When mentally strenuous times hit, I turn to the thing I love most: holidays.“
The most infamous of all was Noriam: a holiday invented by me and my younger brother Liam, which we celebrated every September when we were in elementary school.
The holiday was originally invented because I was a scared first-grader, anxious to go back to school and looking for a fanciful way to focus on the positive. Consequently, the seven nights of Noriam (Liam and I combined our names) was born.
The “Great Eagle” would visit my brother and me each of the seven nights, leaving us presents beside a plush teddy bear lovingly placed on our dining room table. When we first brought this Christmas x Hanukkah-inspired holiday to life, both of us were too young and too cheap to actually buy each other gifts. Instead, we gifted each other our own belongings, excitedly laying them out around the teddy bear.
My brother and I’s ability to create a new holiday, and share in our collective imagination, is the type of joy that I aim to remember and recreate during my time in college. Advancing from a scared first-grader to a scared undergraduate student, I have made it a conscious practice to find moments and excuses to celebrate amid the ongoing dread of adult responsibilities.
Although my stubbornness to uphold holiday traditions has wavered more in the past few years — as reality frequently sinks its claws even deeper into my “adult brain” — I still create time to celebrate the things that evoke my enthusiasm.
Whenever there’s a holiday coming up, I tell myself that if I finish my paper by a certain date, I can go and order holiday decorations from Amazon to liven up my dorm room.
For example, despite the stress of this past week, the Valentine’s Day decorations I hung in my room lifted my spirits when I was worrying about my assignments. My mom even sent me a small gift from “Cupid.”
With the typical heavy workloads and high expectations of the 5Cs hovering over our heads, it’s easy for college life to lose its spark. My point is, whether it’s something as seemingly insignificant as celebrating a holiday, find the one thing that will always make your life exciting and will help you bounce back when you’re struggling. It could be rewarding yourself with a chocolate chip cookie from Crème Bakery after a midterm or watching a football game with friends at the end of a long week. If that motivation happens to be an absurd holiday named after you and your sibling, then it’s even better!
Norah Mannle CM ’27 hails from the suburbs of Washington D.C. In her free time, she enjoys long walks, critiquing new coffee shops and skiing.
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