Thinking about the Holidays and the weeks leading up to it, it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what the Christmas spirit is to university students. When at home, there are Christmas decorations everywhere, the shops in my hometown all have their windows done up with frosted windows and pine branches etc. At school what do we have? 12 Bars of Christmas and all your promoter friends reminding you to buy your New Years Eve tickets for minutes to midnight or something with an equally alliterated name. All the bar talk and exams are enough to turn someone into a Grinch. Somewhere along the line between complaining about going to Carol Services in high school and cramming for three weeks of hell incarnate aka mid-year exams Christmas has become an over-consumerized holiday.
Out of all of this, I think about those Carol Services that I dreaded in high school, and how they contributed to what made up Christmas in my mind. There was the Silent Night service where we were read the story of Silent Night while Mr. Boychuck played the song on his guitar. Or selfishly how in high school I managed to finished exams by the 13th of December without fail. The Christmas traditions that we had when I was growing up have shifted and changed have mostly stayed the same, my parents and I still go to a Christmas Eve Service. We used to go as an entire family to the United Church in our neighbourhood where the majority of our family was baptized but since moving to Oakville we’ve started going to the Christmas Eve service held at my high school.
Maybe my pessimism puts me on the naughty list or maybe my family’s traditions will prevail and it’ll compensate for the exam-induced grinch.
Merry Christmas
xoxo, Steph
