A Student's Rush to Christmas

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Some of you may recall I teach a class at my local community college. I enjoy it tremendously, except for… grading. However, final grades are due tonight by 10pm, so I’ll be grinding away to get through twenty-some final papers by then.

Unlike when I was in school myself, I won’t be powering through with Coca-Cola and a family sized bag of M&Ms, but I suspect a lot of students will be using whatever the modern equivalents are. I had a Zoom meeting with one student who had some questions, and the poor guy looked exhausted. Meanwhile, over in The Hague, Virginia’s communications to me have narrowed down to invitations to edit this or that paper in Google Docs. The miracles of modern technology!

This all makes me think of what this point in December felt like for so many years when I was in college, grad school and law school. The period between Thanksgiving wasn’t full of holiday spirit and preparations, but by frantically trying to catch up with missing assignments, begging professors for an extension, and all-nighters spent producing papers (that always turned out surprisingly good, somehow. This may be the origin of my writing-procrastination habit.)

The occasional glimpses of the season came from twinkle lights hanging around dorm windows and the Christmas music on blast at the pub when we went out drinking. No, the urgency of getting the last papers done didn’t preclude drinking.

It was a hard, exhausting grind, but the reward was the giddiness and relief of successfully wrapping up the term, knowing you had the whole winter break off to sleep late, eat your mom’s home cooking, and hang out with friends. I don’t know if anything else in life has matched the feeling of taking the bus back home, seeing the lights and decorations on the way, knowing my dad would be there at the station to meet me when I pulled in.

How about you, Reds? What do you remember about this time of year in your student days?

 

 

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: What a fun question! I remember from high school that all we cared about was vacation, and that our homework and attention fell to absolute zero.  And our teachers knew it. So then this happened. My junior year, in mid-December, our Honors English class teacher Miss Godfrey assigned us to write a paper on Martin Chuzzlewit and hand it in BEFORE vacation.

 

Are you kidding me? It was about 800 pages!

 

But they didn't call us honors English for nothing. We divided up the book and each read a different part of it, and then got together and put our parts together and discussed it, and then wrote our papers based on the part we had read.

 

 I remember mine was on the scary nurse Sairey Gamp. 

 

I think the entire class clandestinely participated in this–what we thought was such a clever scheme to avoid reading the whole thing, but what, as it turned out, made us all focus on this book  more carefully and deeply than we ever would have if we weren’t being so “clever.”

 

Thank you, Miss Godfrey. You were the clever one. What a gift!

 

JENN McKINLAY: My memories are very similar to yours, Julia, but I had a liter of Coke, a pack of smokes, and a bag of Doritos. Wrote some of my best papers at two in the morning after a night of pub singing with the college boyfriend’s rugby team. Once finals were cleared, my roomies and I then hit the Chapel Square Mall in New Haven to do our down and dirty student budget shopping before we booked it home for the holidays. My memories are more twinkle lights on the city green, the warmth of the stores hitting you in the face when you entered, and then the excited drive home to see the fam, eat home cooking, and catch up to the high school buds also returning home for the holidays. In Arizona, it’s more end of the semester pool parties and barbecues. Weird.

HALLIE EPHRON: What I remember most is that for the first time in my academic life, my college classes assigned more reading than it seemed humanly possible to read, never mind to properly absorb in the time given. And giving up. I’d have asked CHAT GPT for a summary if it had been invented yet {and crossed my fingers hoping the summary was accurate).

 

 

This was complicated by the fact that my occasional trips to the library to “study” were forays to “run into” Jerry who studied in Columbia’s physics library, a spot I’d never even have known existed if it hadn’t been for him. If he was there, and he often was, we played footsie much more than studied.

RHYS BOWEN: At college I seem to remember that we had exams in January which meant studying hung over our heads for the Christmas vacation. Also I worked for the post office during Christmas break. I was a mail person with a huge mail sack slung across me, walking up and down freezing wet streets with the wind howling (at least that is how I remember it). And halfway through the route a mail truck would meet me and exchange my almost empty sack for a full one. It was heavy and tiring work but it did give me some Christmas spending money in case I wanted to pop over to Germany to see my boyfriend… which I did.

My school memory is of our lovely Christmas concert which the elite choir started by processing through the open cloisters wearing robes, carrying candles and singing Benjamin Britten’s Ceremony of Candles. I got chills entering that completely dark auditorium , the lights coming on as we sang Wolkum Yole. We also had a Christmas party for each grade. 

LUCY BURDETTE: I do remember looking forward to reconnecting with high school pals–in bars in our hometown when we were old enough. It was a funny time, because Christmas was beautiful and well-celebrated at home in New Jersey, but then I’d be chomping at the bit to get back to school and away from family! I think I remember the break after Christmas as waaaaayyyy too long.

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I feel very boring here in comparison. I lived at home my first couple of years of college, and after that when I was in my garage apartment, I was only an hour’s drive from home. It was always lovely though, to walk into the old house, and to get my mom to do my laundry, as at college that meant going to a laundromat. 

 

JULIA: How about you, dear readers? What are your memories of racing to get papers and projects done before the Christmas break?