June 2021
With the pandemic in most people's rear view mirror, we asked our
students to reflect upon the tradition of family vacations
Family of Snow
McKenna Snow
Class of 2024
Take away the smart phones. Take away the TVs, too. Add some tall, grey-striped trees outside, and maybe a lake—is it frozen over? I would think so, given the climate outside. It is cold, and the world is enveloped in an ongoing blizzard that refuses to simply "pass through." The thick blanket of snow absorbs the sounds of the forest and makes everything perfectly silent except for the bright red cardinal birds singing in the fir trees. There is a range of mountains in the background, looming over the cabin. The cabin resides in the valley, with a single line of smoke emerging from the bright chimney.
When you go inside, the cabin has old furniture that’s well-maintained for the visitors. These current visitors have made quite a mess with all their luggage—there’s ten of them, after all. They brought a lot of suitcases. And blankets.
As you enter in, the chill of outside begins to sink away as the warmth from the crackling fireplace soaks into your snow-dusted coat. You smell the burning wood, combined with freshly-brewed coffee. It’s ten in the morning. This family likes to consume a lot of coffee, and they’re making their second pot of the day. The aroma of their delightful drink wafts through the air, drawing you to the kitchen.
The kitchen is little—this cabin really wasn’t meant for more than six guests at a time, but this family’s used to tight kitchens—and it’s a little hazy because of the smoke coming from the griddle on the gas stove. About twelve pancakes are sizzling on the griddle, the second round of them. The dad of the visiting family has pancake-cooking down to an exact science. Same with soft-boiled eggs and bacon. Those delights were made perfectly to accompany the fluffy vanilla-scented pancakes.
The youngest three children are helping set the dark-stained wood table with disposable napkins. The thirteen-year-old sister is in charge of getting orange juice or coffee for everyone, and setting the cups at the table.
Once everything has been made, all that is missing is the wax candles lit all down the table, and a CD player of "breakfast classical music," the title which the children use affectionately when asking for Vivaldi. The oldest sister helps turn on the music, and a symphony of violins and cellos fills the bottom half of the two-story cabin. The mom calls that breakfast is ready, and all the kids who were not downstairs helping make breakfast come running down the stairs to fill the little dining room.
The family then enjoys a breakfast completely undistracted from the outside world. The dad does not check the news on his phone while he eats. The sisters aren’t bickering about their hair or something trivial about school. The little kids are behaving, eating their food, sitting pretty still, with all things considered. And conversation is shared by all, joyfully, about the plans of the day, and of the whole vacation. The family maps it all out verbally to one another, talking about everything they want to do while they’re here away from regular life.
The oldest brother and sisters want to go skiing. The sisters are also highly interested in shopping for locally-made beanies, even though the nearest town is a solid twenty miles away. The dad is interested in ice fishing, and the little kids just want to play in the snow. The mom wants to read the books she brought along with her by the fireplace with a good cup of coffee, and take a break from driving her kids everywhere. They also all decide unanimously on holding a game night on the upcoming Friday, in which they’ll play a lot of different card games, after the little kids have gone to sleep.
The family maps it all out, and they decide that with this six-day-long vacation—the longest one they can snag given their busy schedule in the real world—they’ll be able to hit everyone’s wants one by one.
The first day, they all go skiing. They brought the gear themselves, rented from the town they stopped at on their way to the cabin. They locate the best place on the mountain to start, not too hard for those in the family who are less-experienced than others, and they ski away. It’s a long hike up the mountain again after they’ve gone down it, so after a couple of trips, everyone is worn out and ready to return to the cabin.
Back at the cabin, they make hearty mugs of hot chocolate for everyone, a fire is kindled and crackling as they all defrost from the snowy outdoors. The little kids, all wrapped up in the thick blankets they had bought, fall asleep on the couch, so the older members of the family start their Game Night early and play cards. It was a very successful first day to the vacation.
The remaining days are spent just as they hoped, starting off with a hearty breakfast, and a lot of coffee. The dad was able to go fishing (he was very successful), the mom got in lots of good reading and resting, the older siblings skied a significant amount, and the little kids had a wonderful time playing in the snow. Day after day, they spent it together, enjoying this little slice of Narnia-like winter wonderland, their imaginations blooming. A lot of hot chocolate was consumed every day after coming inside from the snow. The Game Night they planned on never really happened, because they ended up playing cards every night, by the fire, listening to more classical music on CD. On the drive home, the girls stopped at the local store, and bought hand-knit beanies, to remember the trip by. It was the best break from the "real world" that any family could have asked for.
This is very much a dream vacation of mine, because my family has never rented a cabin in the woods like this, but someday I hope we can. I feel like we’ve got a pretty good head-start on this experience though; after all, we are the Snows, and we love C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books, and we love having breakfast together on Saturdays, with classical music.
Read other articles by McKenna Snow
Permanent vacation
Emmy Jansen
Class of 2023
I’ve never been to Disney World and I probably never will. I have been to nineteen states and two different countries. But I didn’t lead the ‘Instagrammable’ life of visiting exotic countries and lounging on tropical beaches. Most of my childhood was spent in different military history museums and war reenactment sites.
My family grew up knowing the importance of history. Living in central Virginia, we are about an hour away from major historical sites like Appomattox Courthouse, Yorktown, Williamsburg, and Bull Run. Even closer to home, Richmond is a hotbed for history involving both the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. You are never left wanting for knowledge; it is truly all around you. This has given me a unique perspective on the art of history. It has also given me an obscure set of knowledge that I tend to impart on a conversation whether it is solicited or not.
I wouldn’t trade that for the world, though. Visiting monuments, touring museums, going to Renaissance fairs, trekking through battlefields, and climbing into yet another World War II fighter jet are things I will never get tired of. Our vacations were never just for fun in my family, there was always an element of education my parents seeped into everything we did. Our photo albums are stocked with pictures of us kids holding wooden rifles in reenactments and trying on different soldiers’ uniforms. My parents made it a goal of theirs to visit the birthplace or house of every U.S. presidents, which meant that my siblings and I ended up visiting a lot of presidential homes. I remember going to visit a college I was considering in North Carolina and having to make a short excursion to see the birthplace of Andrew Johnson, just because we had to.
Outside of museums and battlefields, my family camped a lot. We lived in a rural part of the county, surrounded by trees and farmland, but we couldn’t get enough of the outdoors. Middle school and high school memories are marked by weekends spent in state parks across Virginia where we piled into our pop-up camper and came back mosquito bitten and sunburnt. Those are some of my favorite memories.
But what I’ve learned most is that you can make a vacation out of anything. Going to Georgia and Florida were all tag-along vacations that we attached to my dad’s business trips. My brother spent a few summers at camps in Ohio and Pennsylvania which gave us the opportunity to explore the Western parts of those states. We have extended family in New England which meant that every time we went to see them, we made stops on the way up from Virginia. After coming into close contact with someone with COVID-19, I was placed into quarantine housing at Mount St. Mary’s over the Easter holiday, which meant spending ten days isolated in a new room. To keep myself from suffering mentally, I tried to view it as a vacation, my own Spring Break since we were not able to receive one this academic year. Being away from everything, I could pretend, even momentarily, that I was in some new city that had untapped potential for me to uncover.
So really, vacations are more mental than physical. It doesn’t matter if they cost thousands of dollars or only money for gas. It could be a five-star resort or a cheap motel in a country town. For me, you should return from a vacation different than when you left. Even if its as simple as a new appreciation for a part of the world, at least you will have changed. Learned. Grown. I don’t believe in leisure for just the sake of leisure. Yes, there is a benefit to relaxing and recharging our mental and physical batteries. But it should never be done without a purposeful aspect of growth. That is, at least, how I was raised.
I can tell you how each and every vacation I’ve ever taken has changed me for the better. Whether it was during the hours spent in the car in silent reflection or in the new landscape I was shepherded into, something always left an impact on me. I believe I only have my parents to thank for this.
I’ve never been to Disney World and I probably never will. I’d still rather spend a weekend following tour guides through old buildings and looking at artifacts from centuries past. Is it any surprise that I chose to attend a university where I could be at a battlefield site in a matter of minutes? Is it any surprise that my favorite part about Richmond is not the James River or art district but the historical monuments and mementos all around the city?
Vacations are not just a time to relax and escape. They are a chance for reflection and rejuvenation in our busy lives. They provide the opportunity for deeper growth than we cannot achieve sitting stagnant in our homes. And when family are involved, nothing tests the bonds of love more than to be crammed into a car together for six hours. But love does not break; it only grows.
In our modern money-driven world, some people are insecure about the short list of places they’ve been to. I was seventeen the first time I left the country whereas some kids in my classes had been international travelers since they were in elementary school. Some of you reading may have never left the country or been on an airplane or even left the Eastern time zone. All of these things are superficial because it isn’t how much money you spend or where you go but who you are and how you became that person. For me, a foundational aspect of my identity has been the family trips that saw me up and down the East Coast in different museums and war sites. Is that Instagram worthy? Maybe not. But it makes my life worth it. You can have Disney; I’ll take the World.
Read other articles by Emmy Jansen
Nature in my backyard
Harry Scherer
Class of 2022
"You need a vacation." This normative claim can serve as a sharp response to an uptight coworker or an indication of gratitude for an overworked boss. What are we really suggesting for these people, though?
To answer this question, it would make sense to look to the meaning of the word "vacation." Your sensitivity for etymology is keen if you spot a root in the verb "to vacate." The noun vacation indeed comes from this verb, which comes from the Latin "vacare," which means "to be empty, free, or at leisure."
We provide this suggestion of a vacation, then, for those whom we perceive are overly filled, constrained, or busy to recognize their own freedom. At the end of every academic year, I am content with the goals that I have accomplished, due in large part to the guidance and support of my friends, family, and mentors. At the same time, and especially now as I near graduation, I have become more grateful for and more intent on carving out time for vacation.
I am not planning on booking any flights or reserving any hotel rooms; I do not think the opportunity to vacate necessarily demands any sort of monetary investment. Instead, vacation, that state philosophers refer to as "leisure," is made available any time or day with the people that God has given us.
For example, I have found this unique opportunity of writing monthly for page 35 of the Emmitsburg News-Journal to be a regular opportunity for vacation. Every month, I am forced (not in a coercive way) to sit down, retreat from my typical duties, and reflect on whatever I have asked myself and the other writers to reflect on. While I write, there typically arise other mini-vacations within the process of writing. Today, I sit in my backyard and find myself distracted by the royal plumage of the blue-headed blackbirds contending for a spot on the newly replenished birdbath. I look up at the blue sky sprinkled with spatters of lazily floating white clouds. I attempt to draw from my short cigarillo and realize that these pleasant distractions required too much time for the weak flame to stay alive.
This precious time of rest allows my heart rate to decrease, my shoulders to relax, and my concern for the very time of day to diminish. This sort of rest serves as a sort of acknowledgment that "this is good." An acknowledgment of this kind seems to be possible while working, but the very activity of work typically seems to get in the way of such an affirmation. Both of my parents regularly refer to the sort of contemplation I described as "nature in my backyard." I have to come recently think of this description as a delightful confirmation that the escape of a vacation is accessible within the apparent confines of typical experience.
I wonder how this understanding relates to our modern criteria of a good vacation. If the modern conception requires an account of money spent, activities accomplished, and places seen, the two accounts seem to me to be largely incompatible. There might be a substantial difference between scheduling a meeting for work and scheduling a guided tour of some historical landmark, although I’m not sure what that difference is. My experiences of running late to a scheduled engagement and desiring to move on from that engagement to the next one are varied and frequent enough; it seems that taking part in that desire while on "vacation" is at best paradoxical.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve taken part in and enjoyed these sorts of high-activity excursions with family and friends. I look back on them fondly and at the time I considered them to be fun and, in almost every case, memorable. I look forward to taking part in these sorts of activities in the future, possibly with people I have not yet met. It deserves consideration, though, whether these petal to the metal moments of activity properly qualify as vacation. If the two understandings do not relate to one another in any meaningful way, what does that mean for the way we plan vacation and rest? I think that varies from person to person and family to family; ultimately, it is a matter of prudence. There seems to be something wrong, though, if we are not just working to rest, as we should be, but working at rest.
With my former description of rest, it is no wonder why the beach is so frequently related to our conception of vacation. Rest at the beach is an engagement with nature and a very literal attainment to the end of our physical life. A beach is an experience of sense: we hear the waves crashing, see the gulls flying, taste the salt lingering, smell the sea aerosols blowing, and feel the sand sticking. This attachment to the physical world provides for an escape, an emptiness that we find much more difficult to attain in the work of every day.
Just because we find this engagement with nature more difficult, though, does not mean that such a relationship further from shore is impossible. On the contrary, vacation, and especially the true kind of formal vacation with nature, can serve as a necessary reminder for the sort of attention that is owed to our relationship with the natural world as God’s creation. On vacation, we are granted the unique freedom to look up to the sky, for which light is daily given and from which it is just as frequently taken away. At the same time, we feel the ground, rooted immovably under our feet as a sign of permanence and continuance. We see the leaves blowing in the trees, an occurrence that has, is, and will continue to endure through our joys and sorrows. We hear the birds chirping, that recognizable sound that my parents heard on the day of my birth and my children will hear on the day of my death. All of these gifts are the gifts of vacation
that we can experience with nature in our backyard.
Read other articles by Harry Scherer
Family Time
Angela Guiao
Class of 2021
When I was younger, my mother always made the effort to try and take me on at least one vacation each year. She would save up her vacation days and extra money, and we’d have a road trip to another state. So far, we have been to a total of 16 states.
So, I think it’s safe to say I know a little something about vacations. Some years, we would go with a group of friends, but recently we’ve gone with close family. And let me tell you, it hasn’t always been easy.
For my family, just planning a trip is complicated. Everyone wants to go somewhere, and it never is the same place. Then you have to adjust the schedule (then adjust the schedule again) to fit with work and school and financial obligations. By the time we actually decide on a date and destination, I am already exhausted.
But eventually we make our way to the departure date, and we head on our way. For us to have a good enough time, there are a few rules we follow.
Rule number one: No complaining. Now, I know this is a weird rule. But after a very long (11-hour drive) road trip to Maine squished in a Toyota RAV 4 where everyone growled and moaned the entire way there, it just had to be done. Also, complaining just dampens the mood. I do remember one road trip to Boston, where one particularly outspoken cousin disliked every single restaurant, we ate at, and she made sure we knew it. Every. Single. Time. I’m glad that we have this rule now as I can finally eat my food in peace.
Rule number two: No tours. Now, I am sure that you may think that this rule is obviously a result of a very bad tour. And you are correct. We tried to take a tour in Arizona of the Antelope Canyons, and to sum it all up- it was a very bad experience. It was a little more grueling than we expected, so by the end of the tour, there were quite a few of us spilling out our breakfast. While I don’t want to go too much into detail, it is safe to say that not everyone in the family is at the same skill level, hiking wise. So, we decided as a group that we would no longer be taking any tours. You know, so we could all travel at our own pace.
Rule number three: When one eats, we all eat. I personally dislike this rule the most, but after numerous occasions where we had stopped at a McDonald’s or some other fast-food joint, only to stop again at another location of the fast food joint a few blocks later, we decided it best if we all eat at the same time. It has also helped out with rule number one, as most of the complaining usually had to do with food or lack thereof. I personally dislike this rule because sometimes I am simply not hungry. But also, because it means that once someone is hungry, we have to find food wherever is nearest, and it is 99.99% a burger joint. Darn Mickey D’s.
Rule number four: Always have at least one unique experience. When rule number one didn’t exist yet, someone would always complain that whatever we did in that particular state that year, we could have done at home. And it was true. When we went to Chicago, we went to that building that had glass floors. And while it was cool when we went there. It was less cool when we saw it in New York, then again in Boston. So, we decided that each road trip we would experience something we could only experience in that state, whether it be the salt flats in Utah or the magic garden in Philly.
Rule number five (and the final rule): Always sleep at the same time. This was a sacrifice for the majority of the group but has always proven to be necessary. When I am on vacation, I can barely sleep I get so excited. My mom, on the other hand, sleeps insanely early. As a result, there is always a big difference in energy. I wake up groggy and grumpy from the lack of sleep, and my mom wakes up a touch too perky. She also misses all the game nights and campfire songs, which results in a lot of huh’s and who’s during the conversations the next day.
But despite all of these rules, the most important thing, I think, is to go on vacation with people you love. It sounds cliché, but it is impossible to enjoy a vacation with people you don’t enjoy being around, I think.
The bonding time, inside jokes, games, and experiences that you share with your family will stay with you for a lifetime. For me especially, as my mom gets older, I have learned to treasure these moments with her. Sometimes, we forget to cherish the moments with family since they are always there, but I think it is important to have a little change of scenery. New experiences result in a new understanding, of family, of life, and of the world.
While every family may have their own personal set of rules, I know the trip always ends with the sense of appreciation for being able to experience such adventures. Each year, I appreciate the growth I see in my cousins and my family, and I have learned to cherish the fact that despite living very different lives, we always make the effort to come together for our yearly road trip. No matter how complicated and new and fun and sometimes annoying the trip could get, I am thankful to be able to have done it surrounded by people I love.
As the world starts to open up, and travel restrictions lift, I urge you all to value your time with your family, wherever you may end up going. After a year secluded from my own, I know I definitely will.
Read other articles by Angela Guiao
Read Past Editions of Four Years at the Mount
