Going home for Christmas includes three things:

1. You no longer have to pay for groceries (money is always on my mind).
2. You get to see all of your family (if you’re black this includes the “new cousins” that you didn’t know existed, but they’ve known you since your body was the size of a portable heater).
3. You spend a lot of time in the kitchen (except for boys, who should spend more time in the kitchen because this generation of women who may or may not become wives are definitely not concentrated on what’s in your lunch bag).

I was excited when I swung into the driveway of my childhood home. The thought of seeing zany family members overcrowd my house excited me, even if their snowy boot prints would riddle my mom with germaphobia. As you get older, you spend less time with family, and that reality hadn’t hit me until this holiday season.

As a stressed, fiercely opinionated college student, I’m pretty much in the last phase of being away from home. There are two roads you can go after graduation: A) slaving away to make ends meet and live your fabulously poor independent life, or B) moving back in with your loving, yet strict parents and wondering where your chutzpah went.

Home feels like a prison the moment you arrive after first semester freshman year. You don’t understand where your mom gets the audacity to tell you to wash the dishes (NBD, she only spent hours in painful labor just to birth your ungrateful ass), and where your dad staunchly believes that you want to help him fix the cabinets, screw in lightbulbs, and worst of all *inward shudder* shovel the driveway.

When I walked in (I forgot to shut door since apartment doors respectfully slam shut on their own) to greet my mom as a mid-semester junior, after powering through midterms using the last shred of my work ethic (which means senioritis is waiting around the corner like a heart attack at Sunday brunch), my first thought was: where’s the spiked Egg Nog?

And as I sipped on it at the kitchen counter, flipping through Home Goods and Pier One magazines (obviously all under my mom’s subscription) I thought about the true meaning of this billion dollar-producing holiday.

Christmas to me means knowing exactly what’s under the tree (because I’m not six anymore), and also not being able to wear until Christmas day arrives. It means shopping for my family, and actually knowing what they would like because my adult brain is now in motion. It means relishing in winter spirits and family comfort because you don’t know who will be around next year.

2017 has been short, and the presidency/election/all-out American hoopla has made it feel even shorter, but going home to sit with family in front of fireplace reminds me: I wouldn’t have made it through any of it without the ones I love.