TOM WOLFE says that "you can never go home again," but home is where we're headed in a week or two. We'll flee Charlottesville after the last blue book is filled and the final scantron bubbled in, like refugees from a war-torn land of number-two pencils, carrying our worldly possessions in a dirty laundry sack. We board our planes, wait at the Amtrak stop, pile into those NoVa-bound SUVs and in a matter of hours, we've arrived at what most of us still call home.
Returning to places where nothing has changed is always a reminder of how much we have, and the chasm between who we were and who we have become often leads to a bit of holiday-season heartache. There are the first years that will realize in the next couple weeks that the high school relationships that they were certain would stand the test of college simply haven't, and the upperclassmen facing the slowly dawning realization that the friends they swore would be at their wedding won't even be at the same New Year's 2005 party. But regardless of how the high school scene ended up, one thing is as constant and inescapable as post-Thanksgiving retail sales. It's the real f-word: family.
The next few weeks will see a thousand variations of the same arguments across the country as we try vainly to make our parents understand that majoring in anthropology is not a waste of perfectly good tuition dollars, that just because we don't have a job lined up by Christmas doesn't mean we won't get one by graduation in May and that he or she makes us happy, which after all is so much more important than being Catholic/Korean/Jewish/rich, right? The next few weeks will find hundreds of us grinding our teeth, enduring the frustration of being treated like a raving extremist, or worse, condescended to in that tone smacking of "you'll grow out of it," the familiar lament of any parent whose child who has found their education at odds with what they were raised to believe. The next few weeks will mean millions of fights with siblings who learned how to push our buttons back when we were five and haven't quit doing it for the last decade and a half.
So why do we do it? At what point did "home for the holidays" become the status quo, when "home" equals headache? Our time off from work and stress is so precious little, why on earth would we spend it with people we don't like?
The simple answer: because we love them.
There is something so comforting about the presence of people who are biologically programmed to care about us, something so utterly unconditional about the ability to scream at someone until you're hoarse and then laugh like it never happened over pancakes the next morning, all the while unconcerned about the effect such brutal highs and lows might have on your relationship. We go home because the people who best understand us are the people who raised us, and because, let's be honest, the reason all those arguments are so agonizing is that they know us too well. We go home because when we're at our sick-stressed-exhausted worst (and god knows that's usually the state we're inpost-exams) we just want to be around people who don't require us to try our best. No matter how close we are to our friends here, no one at school really knows how hard we sobbed when our gerbil died in the sixth grade or how many times we rehearsed the safety patrol pledge to earn our badge in elementary school.
We embrace the holiday season so wholeheartedly because it's the same year after year, and at a time in our lives where everything seems so uncertain, that means something pretty big. From the Thanksgiving Day parade to the ball's downward trajectory on New Year's Eve and all of the carols on the all-Christmas-all-the-time radio station (and every town has at least one) in between, we know exactly what to expect from the holidays. It follows, then, that we want to spend them with the people we love for being so damn predictable, and for their uncanny ability to predict us.
Perhaps Tom Wolfe is right, and home changes too much in our absence for us to ever return, and we change too much as well. We can never really go back to what we left, even a mere semester earlier. But I'll be in one of those North-bound cars in a week or two anyway, sitting in traffic on Route 29 and anxiously awaiting the sign announcing I've crossed the state line into Maryland, because there are a few people waiting there that haven't really changed all that much. And though they make me crazy, I'd have to be even crazier to want to spend my holidays anywhere else.
Happy holidays, everyone. Now go home.
Katie Cristol's column usually appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at kcristol@cavalierdaily.com.
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