Holiday Time

     Holidays are a classic time for families to get together and spread cheer and do things together, as we all know. November through January are a hectic time with Thanksgiving and the winter holidays, but growing up with my mother, father, brother, and sister, we never but a lot of time or effort into celebrating extravagantly. We did the whole dinner at Thanksgiving bit and presents on Christmas, but nothing too fancy. Once I began to live with my friend Kevin and his family when I was 15, holidays became a much bigger deal.

     For starters, I was always the youngest member in my own household, so I was the focal point of certain holidays like Halloween and Christmas. In my new home, I have an 11 year old sister (Karly) and a 16 year old brother (Kyle), so the focus totally is shifted towards them. Holidays are taken much more seriously in this home. Halloween is Karly's favorite holiday. With mom gone from on business trips so often it falls to me and Kevin, my friend whose family i live with, to take her trick or treating or to make sure everything is going smoothly for her day. Thanksgiving is when older sister Katie comes home from Virginia Tech to spend time with the family and cooks Thanksgiving dinner for a family of 7 people. Christmas is easily the most hectic time, as I'm sure it is for most families, for the household. Mom is always big on family time and togetherness and so is Christmas, calling for the need of perfect holidays. This was a far-cry from the lax holidays I had become accustomed to, and in the beginning I was a mixture of put-off and annoyed at the extra effort needed to spend time with family. However, as I spent more and more time around these holidays and their new found prominence in my life, I began to appreciate more the fact that I was a part of them. Anyone who sees the family around this time can easily see how the holiday mood affects them. Everyone is much calmer in a usually more frantic environment, the lazier members of the house find themselves contributing more, and everyone seems more intent on keeping the peace. These kinds of environments have had a positive effect on me as a person overall because I feel much happier throughout the year and have more to look forward to than just food and presents.

     This type of attitude contrasts with what I had grown up with. The holidays I were used to did not have extra meaning to them so the environment of the house never saw that type of emotional upswing that was the norm at Kevin's house. No one gave a damn if it was September 25th or December 25th, there was a way things were done and just because the holidays came around did not mean that the rules suddenly changed. The reprieves the holidays have brought have become an important part of my life.

     The effects can be seen taking place on Karly and Kyle too, which is most important because they are the ones who are most easily shaped by what they see. So while it's nice I have gotten a chance to have a new experience, it is even more crucial that the younger ones now know what successful family life during the holidays looks like. 

     The different ways for adults to manage less stressful holidays is included in the link below. 
http://web.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.vccs.edu:2048/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=a122441d-32bd-4d25-ac45-732a79e74cd4%40sessionmgr10&vid=5&hid=27

Richardson, Whitney. "Stress Less" Holidays." Country's Best Cabins 17.7 (2012): 6. Associates Programs Source. Web. 28 Apr. 2013.