Every December, the festivities begin, and people start aiming for that Christmas spirit. As a senior in high school, that attitude can be hard to find. Having a family that lives hundreds of miles apart makes it even more difficult.

With finals just after winter break, the stress to pass classes will be beginning to climb. Some students have already started studying, and as soon as we return from break, most of us assume that the workload will only get bigger. The students in college classes have already started on their finals, and some have mentioned a heightened amount of anxiety about that.

Some people struggle to find the cheer in Christmas because even though we have a couple weeks off school, there’s still no time to just relax. There’s family to visit, presents to wrap, traveling to do, and decorations to put up, and it really makes it hard to consider this a break. Maybe for some, there’s plenty of time, but I know many of the people in this school have multiple Christmas celebrations just for immediate family, because of divorced parents. Then there are bigger family celebrations, things with friends, significant others, and it seems like that should mean that there’s so much love to go around. The more the merrier, right? But sometimes having separate occasions with everyone can just make you feel alone and thinly spread.

It really doesn’t help the stress levels if you have had people that have passed away this year, or have had people pass around the holidays. Christmas time should be about love and celebration, but for a lot of people, it causes a lot of tension between family members.

That isn’t to say that seeing family can’t help people feel better, or that everyone is completely swamped with no time to breathe, but the idea of a break is betrayed by the insistence to fill every second of it.

Really, this is just a friendly reminder to be kind to one another and to be patient when we come back. You don’t know the stress that someone had to go through over the break.