There's a change in the weather coming. One that makes everyone feel more nostalgic than watching 90's Nickelodeon during a sock hop to "No Scrubs".
The Holiday Season.
The BEST time of year! (In my less-than-humble opinion) And with its changes between dark green, shades of fiery orange, and peaceful white comes breaks from work and school, for both young'uns and adults alike, to join with their loved ones for the holidays and time relaxing.
However, for the Millennial middle-schooler, this time of year meant something else: even more of a day-off, and even more of the coveted half-day. This legendary type of day meant that although you had school in the morning, you could leave at 11:30am after not really doing any work in your radically shortened classes. And boy, did we take advantage of it. We spent our time...
Raiding All The Food
If your parents were anything like mine, they only bought good snacks once in a while, and they were only to be eaten with your lunch or on special occasions. (So you wouldn't "spoil your dinner", or "ruin Thanksgiving by eating literally all the guests' food".) But you would NOT waste a golden opportunity to eat all the food you normally couldn't, so when a half day rolled around, you knew what to do. Microwave dinners, fruit snacks, Pizza Rolls...you basked in hedonistic glory for a full four hours before your parents arrived home. Likely to you, groaning on the kitchen floor, with horrid indigestion.
Doing Nothing With Friends
You made massive plans. You told yourselves you would bike miles, visit exotic new locales, and explore your futures. Instead, you met your friend at their house, laid on their couch, and never got up again. Maybe you played a few rounds of Halo 3, but you felt as if the best way to spend the day was relaxing, decompressing from the stress of middle school work. (Ha.) Coincidentally, this was a pretty good prelude to adult life for you, since the free time adults get is usually spent lounging in existential despair.
Doing EVERYTHING With Friends
On the other hand, maybe you DID take advantage of the day's freedom, and planned it chock full of adventure! Be it finally exploring your neighboring towns, filming that YouTube short, or building a snow fort before a great snowball war, you definitely spent a day taking advantage of your time. And when it was done, you collapsed indoors, exhausted. Probably with Caprisun, or Go-Gurt, or something else nostalgic.
Playing Amazing Internet Games
Whether we brought up AddictingGames.com or Runescape, we all loved to unwind with a game we knew was the height of gaming artistry. We poured hours into perfecting our skills at Bejeweled, The Sims, or the myriad of Mario clones online, and boy, were they top-shelf products. Okay, to be honest, most of them aged more poorly than Macaulay Culkin's spoiled milk. Load up most of these nowadays, and you'll find a garbled mess of pixels and cheesy dialogue, but at the time, they were the cream of the crop. Except Runescape - they are STILL updating Runescape! I'm not joking, look it up.
Getting Terrible Fast Food
Along with eating every snack in your house, our taste buds also led us astray in a different direction - that godforsaken corner of America where corporations meet cuisine - fast food. We all had a McDonald's or Arby's in our town that all the local kids liked to meet, even though all our health teachers would choke on their kale smoothies if they saw us there. It didn't matter! We were exploring our expanding horizons, by expanding our waistlines.
Browsing The Questionable Internet
And finally, something few of us are proud of. Rarely did we get the time to use the computer without regulation or supervision, so when the time to surf the web freely came, oh WOW did we abuse that power. We watched Family Guy and Homestar Runner, creepy YouTube videos like Salad Fingers, played video games full of cursing, and showed our friends every last morsel of it. We reveled in our newfound maturity...right up until our parents checked our browser history and recoiled in horror.
So whatever your schedule is like nowadays, take some time out to relive those old days this holiday season. Bike somewhere with friends. Play old games together. Buy all the snacks 11-year-old you would've wanted to eat. Because what else are the holidays for, than to reconnect with your weird, awkward roots?
