Here's to round 21 of the holidays.
Here's to almost 21 years of Christmases and New Years, of time spent with a quickly and continuously growing group of family and friends in the close vicinity of fake fur trees.
Here's to the change each season brings to the faces and lives of the people we love.
And here's to being absolutely terrified of what we might find at next year's round 22 of the holidays.
Senior year has sent me into a surreal spin. Walking to class on a beautiful fall day in October, I realized I will never see the leaves change color on Miami's campus again.
I know that sounds cheesy, but I like cheesy. I do cheesy.
I realize as I say goodbye to all of my friends leaving to go to Luxembourg, I will probably never see them again. I won't be able to enjoy the charms of Oxford's white Christmas lights casting a glow on the streets of cobblestone. I won't wonder if a drunk guy will steal a Christmas tree from the quaint lot in uptown park like last year. And I know I won't see a display of a female's anatomy in white and red lights taped to a house called "Tuna." (Be glad you missed that one). No more tacky Christmas sweater parties, because starting next year, the tacky sweaters will be legit.
I find it hard to get into the Christmas spirit this year because I am so scared about what my next Christmas will bring. I feel like everything I have ever known is changing. And it is.
Who am I going to be in the holiday season of 2006? Where on the map am I going to come from? Who will come with me? What will I leave behind? Who am I leaving behind?
I look to the years of past Christmases for their own benchmarks. Christmas #18 was the year when my youngest brother no longer believed in Santa Clause. Christmas morning really loses its charm when the childish innocence of believing in Santa has disappeared. Christmas #14 was my family's first holiday season without Grandpa. Christmas #7 was my first year with a newborn baby brother. Christmas #9 was the year my sister and I gave my parents "boxes of love" for gifts (aka. an empty cardboard box we decorated with hearts and said was filled with love). I'm struggling this year not to resort to my 1993 idea of packaging emotion and giving it as a present - it's super cheap.
Now the Grinch in me is grumbling about what Christmas #22 will provide. And I know shouldn't be grumbling about it. I should be excited. But to be honest, I'm sick of hearing how excited I should be about this "wonderful time" in my life where opportunity presents itself to me upon my achievement of a diploma from Miami University.
It's petrifying. How am I going to be functional in the real world when my bank account is currently at $60.02? How can I live on my own when I've shared a room with either my sister or a roommate my whole life? When I've lived with my family of six, my dorms of 200, my house of 13? It's a huge transition and I'm sick of thinking about it and talking about it and stressing about it.
So here's to living up the rest of our senior year. We have one semester left, and we'd better make the best of it.
Here's to no job offers, happy hours, capstones, pub crawls, grad school applications, themed parties, letters of recommendation, letters of acceptance, letters of rejection, senior pass-downs, internships, steins, group projects and '80s night.
Here's to telling Aunt Edna, when she asks us in two and a half weeks what we're doing after graduation, "Oh, graduation? I haven't really thought about it."
Here's to New Year's Resolutions - not of losing 10 pounds or of quitting smoking - but of savoring our last moments of undergraduate education and being residents of this little city we call Oxford.
Here's to Christmas, because no matter where I come from, and who I've brought, and who remains behind, I will still have my core of family and friends to share the holidays.
And here's to writing the cliche of all cliched columns - a perspective about Christmas in the last issue before winter break. The icing on the over-used-topic cake is the fact that I also found a way to incorporate graduation into the mess.
But you know what? I've got my last tacky Christmas sweater party to go still.
