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Humans are emotionally tied to anniversaries. Sometimes it’s conscious, like reliably crying each year as you blow out your birthday candles and acknowledge your fear of getting older. Other times it’s subconscious, even primitive, like noticing a mysterious sadness in the air before realizing it’s the anniversary of a loved one’s death.

The holiday season is an anniversary in its own right. But unlike personal anniversaries, the reminders of the holiday season’s annual return are inescapable. Mariah Carey starts playing in the grocery store, artificial pumpkin spice air freshener saturates the dorm halls and someone sitting in front of you in lecture is making a “2025 Black Friday wishlist” on their computer.

During our first months away from home, college students experience the so-called anniversary of the holiday season differently than ever before. It can be as simple as feeling weird when our personal and familial traditions become impossible to carry out in our new environments.

These traditions can be much more important to us than we realize. Suddenly, there’s nothing to distract us from anxiety about final exams and the fact that we see the sun for what feels like mere minutes a day. Learning to intentionally keep up these traditions takes time, especially when we’ve never had to before.

But sometimes going home doesn’t make the holiday season feel less lonely, either. We hold expectations: hopes to reconnect with an ex-situationship, desires to prove to home friends that we’re more attractive and intelligent since the last time they saw us and plans to heal dysfunctional dynamics with our parents.

When we do get home, these expectations are often met with disappointment. It’s easy to feel like we’ve regressed into a past version of ourselves when all the people we’re reuniting with have missed out on our recent advancements. The tendency to reignite resolved arguments and slip back into habits we’ve outgrown is normal. The urge to compare our “current self” with our “home self” is normal, too. While these identities don’t have to be mutually exclusive, it’s still challenging to reconcile them.

The holiday season heightens our awareness of the fact that college is an in-between stage, forcing us to choose what traditions and parts of ourselves we want to keep or leave behind. Constant social reminders of the season can conjure thoughts about loss, change and who we were last Christmas versus who we are now.

But college life itself also acts as a distraction from the occasionally painful transition from adolescence into adulthood. The holiday season just makes this transition more obvious. While it’s hard to grapple with change head-on, these months are a time when loneliness and isolation are not uncommon. This shared experience can act as a unifying force, but only if we let it.

Especially in the earlier stages of college, catching up with new friends about our breaks gives us our first real glimpses into their home lives. It can be almost shocking, realizing there’s still so much to be learned about the people we’ve already spent so much time with. As we pile on our cold-weather layers, we begin to shed our emotional ones.

Even the holiday season edition of small talk is more humanizing than regular small talk. On campus, questions transition from the classic, “How was your weekend?” to “Where’d you go over the break?” And when talking about where we go “home” to, we’re being vulnerable, even if it doesn’t feel intentional.

But there are also intentional ways to be vulnerable, like sharing traditions we love from home with the people we spend time with at school. It won’t be the exact same, but we’re meant to adapt – by intentionally bringing these parts of ourselves back to college with us, we bridge the gap that college life normally distracts us from. We own the in-between stage rather than letting it own us.

Three years ago, during my first holiday season since getting to Syracuse University, I decided to take a walk through the snow. I put on my boots and a multicolored scarf and braved the 1.7 miles from South Campus to Marshall St., where I sat on a bench and ate chocolate pretzels in the cold. I was miserable and homesick.

The holiday season will always return – in the scent of the dorms, the grocery store playlists, the feeling of a first snow – pushing us to reflect and process the ways we’ve changed.

In my final December at SU, the snow walk to the corner store for a bag of chocolate pretzels has become my favorite tradition. I’ve started my walk from different homes, worn various scarves and felt all sorts of emotions over the years. But I love looking for the Christmas trees in the windows of the apartment buildings, the taste of chocolate pretzels and the fact that I converted a temporary fix to homesickness into an intentional ritual – one unique to this place, which I now love, too.

Maya Aguirre is a senior magazine news and digital journalism and history major. She can be reached at msaguirr@syr.edu.

Published on December 3, 2025 at 8:12 pm