egins, Hillsdale students across the country start to long for snowy grey Michigan, with slush on the sidewalks, and friends huddled around the heater in an off-campus house. As our hearts turn toward the alma mater, we begin to realize something unexpected: Christmas Break is too long.
“What?” you may ask. “Why would I want to be in Hillsdale any longer?”
But be honest with yourself: By the third week, most of us have already started packing our bags, anticipating a return to friends and classes.
It’s not that we don’t want to be with our families, but here we have responsibilities, activities, and our closest friends. We are building four years of our lives around this academic institution, and Hillsdale quickly starts to feel like our home. But falling smack-dab in the middle of every school year, Christmas Break – fattening, lazy, and a whole month long – seriously interrupts the flow.
Four weeks is just shy of the time necessary to pick up temporary employment or a gym membership. Yet it is just long enough to turn our minds and midsections to mush.
In our early twenties, we have more energy than we will ever have again. We have chosen to spend four years pouring that energy into learning so that we can go out into the world better prepared for an adult life – a life where most of us will never get a vacation longer than two weeks.
And we prepare ourselves for this life by watching Netflix for a month.
Christmas is a welcome respite from all the stress, but by the third week, most of us are ready to get back into the swing of things. So why not return after . . . wait for it . . . three weeks?
Summer will come soon enough (sooner, if we shorten Christmas Break), along with summer jobs, internships, classes, study abroad, and beaches. But for the school year, we need to keep our minds sharp. We need a reason to wake up in the morning, even if that reason is a looming paper deadline, and even if we’ve already been up since the previous morning.
A three-week vacation would be just long enough to spend time with family, rest from the stress of hell week and finals week, and gorge ourselves on Christmas cookies. But it would be short enough to reunite with friends a week earlier, avoid mental atrophy, and prepare ourselves for a world where only the French take four-week vacations.
