This morning I woke up to go to my eight-o-clock and looked outside to find that it was snowing heavy and windy. Tramping through dry, slippery winter without a hat sounded unappealing, as did Civilization class, so I stayed in bed. Already you and my day have been properly introduced. Isn’t she lovely? At nine I went to Brit Lit where I blinked my way through “Gray’s Elegy” and Christopher Smart’s cat. As I was walking out, Dr. Brown stopped me, and said that I’d seemed so tired lately, was taking fewer notes, and did not seem to be concentrating very well. Was I getting enough sleep? I said I was just ready for the semester to be over. Then I hurried away and tears sprung from some hitherto unknown reservoir of weariness.

I called my mother just to ask about a novel and she heard my panic. I did my French homework, and began to calm down. I walked over to the SAC to pick up a package from home. On the outside was written in sharpie “Dear Alice, Don’t cry in the mailroom. Mom.” I was startled. How had she known? It wasn’t as if she’d sent the package in the last twenty minutes, and all of this fatigue had only hit me today. As I walked back to MEP I wondered, was there something inside so touching, so personal…? That wasn’t like my mommy. Then I remembered something she’d mentioned several days before. She was only joking, saying that now I wouldn’t feel left out while all my friends were opening their big fat care package ordered by their parents for a campus fundraiser. Of course. She did not expect tears and melodrama, she expected laughter and good sense. That was the mother I knew and loved.

This afternoon I sat in the lobby with friends, and just happened to look up my house on google maps. Then I looked up my grandparents’ house,  then Karen’s, then Caldwell… I gave myself a virtual tour of home. In fact, I even tried to drive home from school using street view, but the going was a little slow. So I just switched back to my house and stood in the middle of Scott Avenue, spinning in circles, watching the summer leaves shading my front porch race by again and again. It was almost as good as the real thing. Well, not almost. Just sort of.

As everyone else is beginning their Christmas season, we here at Grove City are entering our stress season. I already have friends studying behind locked doors, and I myself am contemplating who exactly would be a good jailer for my computer. Maybe Katie? Anyhow, true to form, I’m not worried about exams, but I hate them just as much as everyone else. They haven’t begun yet, though… On Saturday night I went to a lovely Christmas party with lots of families. There were about seven different kinds of soup for supper. Then we went caroling and had a gingerbread house competition. I wished I was nine years old again, sliding around in sock feet with a sparkly Christmas sweater and my hair falling into excited, sweaty wisps about my face.

Then last night were the candlelight services at the chapel which are famous, and rightly so. Lots of people from the community come, touring choir sings, the Christmas story is recited, and then everyone lights their candle and Harbison Chapel’s sanctity seems to be consummated yet again as the organ swells and we all sing Silent Night. At “Christ, the Saviour is born; Christ, the Saviour is born” as everyone lifted their candles in solemn unison, and Liesel and I snorted back laughter, I forgot my constant wish that Christmas would arrive faster. Why wish for something you already have?

So to summarize this jumbled entry: Don’t cry in the mailroom, Alice, because in eight days you will be on a plane zooming toward the dear sister you haven’t seen since August, your tall baby brother, your parents, and assorted cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents. Also, go ahead, be nine years old with pink cheeks and a sugar high, for “Christ, the Saviour is born!” Happy Christmas, goober. Study hard.