“Home for the holidays” — it can mean so many things.
If the circumstances involve a college kid coming home for Christmas break, “home for the holidays” can mean two wildly divergent sets of expectations and hopes for what will happen.
There’s the kid, who has gotten used to independence away from the parents and grown to like it. There’s the parents, who haven’t seen their kid in a while and would like to bring back the days when he or she loved nothing more than spending time with Mom and Dad.
Never the twain shall meet.
We’ve produced a Venn diagram to make things clear, with a tweak: The middle section doesn’t really show so much what the two sets have in common as it does what the reality will be.
This article appears in Dec 15-21, 2011.