Columbus Day Musings

Well, according to the calendar, today is Columbus Day. And no, this isn’t going to be some rant about whether Columbus discovered America (I suspect that he didn’t). I will leave that to greater minds than mine, although I would suspect that it will come up in some category on Jeopardy!

As I sat at my computer this morning, while it was still dark outside, when I should have been walking with the group but didn’t because of the monstrous headache that had taken residence in my cranium, I got to thinking….

Wait!!! It isn’t as scary as it sounds.

Well, my thought processes are often times scary and incomprehensible except to me but that is for another post.

No, I got to thinking about what I miss about holidays, or specifically school holidays. Kids do still get Columbus Day off don’t they? I haven’t seen the school bus go by so I have to assume yes. And I think that LookLeap mentioned no school for her kiddos so I think I am safe with this assumption. And I would bet there won’t be any mail delivery today. Max will be crushed. It is one of the highlights of his doggy day. And the library won’t be open, rats!, and I have a book to pick up there.

But I digress.

What I really miss about school holidays was the whole “otherness” of the day. When the progeny were living here and in school our days started early. Breakfast at 6:30a and out the door a bit before 7a, usually with me driving them to school, at least until someone had a driver’s license thank goodness. They didn’t go to public school and we rarely had bus service so it was in the car and on the way. We had a busy schedule and to deviate from it spelled disaster.

And yes we did eat breakfast all together….every morning…without fail. Evidently that is an odd thing to do.

But I digress….again.

But on holidays, oh holidays, all that was set aside (even the breakfast together).

I am an early riser. 5a and I love each other and like to spend quality time together. But the rest of the family doesn’t feel that way. They don’t like 5a. They don’t want to spend time with 5a. They are prejudiced against 5a. So 5a and I are together in our aloneness.

And on school holidays it was so nice to be alone much longer in the mornings. I loved the extra quietness that the house would have without the hustle and bustle of a school day starting. Especially in the winter time when it would still be dark outside. It almost felt like I was in my own little cocoon. All wrapped up in darkness.

It just always felt like a day full of possibilities that didn’t have anything to do with schedules. If we didn’t want to get out of pjs we didn’t have to. If we wanted to have popcorn for lunch we could. If we wanted to watch TV all day – a Charleton Heston marathon perhaps – we could do that. Read books for endless hours without guilt. No problemo.

And my favorite were Snow Days, which we seem to have a fair number of some years. The hoping the night before. The early morning monitoring of TV, radio and internet for the joyous word that school was closed. We are allotted 5 snow days a year by the State of Ohio and there were many years when we used up all of them and more.

It would be so quiet outside. Our road is considered a “secondary road” in our small little corner of the Frozen Northeast Ohio and that means that they plow it when they feel like it….sometimes not until after 2p if it has been a particularly heavy snow. The fellow that plows our driveway is here by 5a…the city……not so good.

My life these days is very full but very scheduled. Not so many opportunities to throw the schedule out the window and just say, “what the heck lets eat junk today and watch movies!” I am sure that I could rearrange my schedule to put that on the calendar but it just wouldn’t be quite the same.

Sigh.

I miss it.

Maybe the progeny should move back home….

I don’t think so.