When December rolls around during your freshmen year of college it can be both exciting and nerve-racking to visit your hometown for the first time. Since so much anticipation goes into waiting for this break to visit friends, family and all the places of home you miss so dearly, it can be a very emotional visit. Many new college students come home for their first break feeling melancholic, homesick and often second guess their decision to ever leave their hometown. However, visiting home for the first time isn’t exactly what I thought it would be. Here are 15 things that happen upon visiting home during your first break, as told by The O.C.

1. Everyone will ask about your classes and your major and your future.

2. Being reunited with your friends and family will feel just as good as you thought it would and you’ll want to spend every moment you can with them.

3. You’ll probably run into many of the people you planned to never see again after graduation day.

4. And when you do run into said people, you’ll want to make sure that they notice how much more sophisticated and cool you are after finishing your first term at college.

5. Telling your friends everything important that happened in the past few months since you last saw each other will take hours.

6. You’ll want your friends and family to love all your new friends just as much as you do so you talk them up the whole time.

7. Being in your own home has never felt so good.

8. You’ll forget what the weather was like in your hometown regardless of how long you lived there before your few months in a new environment.

9. Home cooked meals and going out to eat become much more appreciated because the money isn’t coming out of your broke college student fund.

10. People will try to remind you of all those days back in high school that you never wanted to think about again.

11. After enough time passes and you spoke to enough people in your hometown that you hadn’t spoken to in months, you’ll begin to remember why you were so excited to go to college in the first place.

12. You’ll start wishing that you could hang out with your friends from school more than anyone else.

13. Eventually it’ll become evident that you aren’t as close with your friends from high school as you once were and your life really is back at college now.

14. As break comes closer to an end you’ll feel torn because part of you will wish you could stay home and live there forever but the other half of you can’t wait to get back to your new life.

15. In the end, you’ll have to say bye to everyone you love so much and it definitely won’t be easy, but you will keep your head up because now that you have made it this far you know you will be okay and you can make it through until the next time you come home and do it all again.