I saw someone tweet something today along the lines of, “It’s at the point of the year when you have to sort everything into ‘December Problems’ or ‘January Problems,'” to which someone else responded, basically saying that at this point, everything is a January problem. Suffice to say, I understand that point of view particularly well right now.
Despite not having worked in education for more than two decades now — and not having been a student for even longer — I maintain a sincere belief in school holidays as a model for… well, time off from everything. Obviously, not everyone can enjoy two weeks of break around the holidays, and it’s not even something that everyone would want, more fool them, but still: I wholeheartedly think that having a significant holiday break would be a better thing for the majority of people at this time of year.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, in no small part because the nine-year-old is on holiday break right now, and I have found myself being actively jealous; listening to him talk about how he has the next two weeks off and thinking to myself, you’re not even going to appreciate it properly like some old curmudgeon.
(In my defense, he won’t; I certainly never did, when I was a kid. The last couple of days of the holiday would arrive and I’d somehow be surprised, feeling as if I’d wasted every moment of break to that point.)
(That doesn’t actually mean I’m not a curmudgeon, however.)
All of this is a preamble to admitting that I am, in an unofficial sense, declaring a holiday break for myself this year. This is assisted by the fact that work is supernaturally slow as the year draws to a close, but I’ve decided to attempt to carve myself some downtime over the next couple of weeks — outside of the actual holidays themselves — in order to try and get my brain a little less full and a little more prepared for what’s to come. Let’s try to get 2022 started as right as possible, even if everything might collapse just days later; hell, based on this year, maybe even just hours later.