Happy Holidays! Please leave!

2–3 minutes

Students having awkward conversations with their whole family over the holiday

Staff Writer

Public enemy number one: holiday dinner with the “entire” family. The bane of Luke McCoy’s existence and the reason he dreaded the holidays. Suffering through finals season and college applications apparently did not meet Luke’s struggle quota for the year because now, “tis the season” to suffer. While Luke rocked back and forth in a corner due to finals week, he had to deal with the suffering associated with his family’s holiday dinner.

Luke’s only hope of surviving this dreaded season of fake cheer and passive aggressiveness was to make a game plan. A plan that took into account any awkward questions and produced responses that will stall his relatives long enough to escape into a pie-induced coma.

The first genre of questions he has to dodge are the dreaded school-related questions. Luke understood that these questions are pretty reasonable to ask, however he would’ve preferred not answering them when he was halfway through inhaling a plate full of canned cranberry sauce. While this genre of questions is mostly fine, there is a point later on where the alarm bells start to ring.

A festive Christmas tree lot in the rotunda features handmade paper trees and wreaths (Photo Credit: Ivan Chu (11)).

As these bells begin to ring, the college questions begin—the ones that hone in on Luke’s college plan. Questions like “What colleges did you apply to?” “Have you heard back from any of them?” “What majors are you thinking of applying for?” These are all lovely questions that totally don’t keep him up at night. Luke knew the best answer to this subgenre of questions was to fake ignorance, or simply talk about a major that he might enjoy. With some luck, his uncle Ricky just nodded his head afterwards and left to torture some other poor soul.

The second type of questions from this underworld are personal questions. These questions—specifically about relationships—pried into areas of Luke’s life he would rather not discuss over mashed potatoes. What makes this worse is that there was no escape for Luke from this interrogation. These questions—ones like “Do you have a partner?” “When will you get married?” “When do you have kids?”—really just make people of all ages want to smack their head against a wall, so hard they don’t wake up until after New Year’s. The best solution to these issues is to avoid them entirely by quickly changing the topic. Once this strategy completely failed, Luke didn’t hesitate to throw someone under the bus. It’s survival of the fittest.

Luke’s one saving grace was that, at the end of his nightmare, he could wish his relatives happy holidays. And to please—for the love of everything—leave his house until next year.