Ways to Spend the Holidays, From Traditional to Unique

Want to spice up your holiday season? With a little cinnamon, a little nutmeg, and a dash of pumpkin spice (this combination would hopefully taste delicious), you’ll find yourself a super-awesome-fantastic-unforgettable holiday season.

Okay, so adding spices to your holiday might not exactly “spice things up”, but you get the point.

A lot of people are looking for new and creative ways to make their holiday season unique and special. Sometimes the holidays can be so frantic that people forget to sit down and enjoy a nice cup of hot chocolate with mallows.

What about spinning the holiday season 180 degrees, doing things that you hadn’t done before, or maybe doing the same thing but amp it up a little?

One idea that could freshen up the holiday season would be to host a holiday pot luck. All of your friends and family can come together bringing their favorite dishes to make for the holiday season. By the time that everyone gets together, there would be all different kinds of food, ranging from entrees to desserts. Talk about all those yummy leftovers. There will also be plenty of food, laughter, conversations, and memories.

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Setting New Year’s Resolutions

Enter the New Year with Achievable Goals

Invincible.

That is how most of us feel when deciding what will be our New Year’s resolution. Our goals, hopes, and dreams that we fathom of achieving seem like a hop, skip, and a jump away from becoming reality. 

Go to the gym every day. Eat organic. Become a vegetarian. Quit smoking. No more sweets and desserts. Stop drinking alcoholic beverages. Spend less money on non-necessities. 

Goal-setting is such a wonderful incentive for change, and aiming for tangible and achievable goals is much more practical.

Although the above list is a small portion of the most common New Year resolutions, most of them are not met.  How come?

New Year’s resolutions seem to be spontaneous motives that we make immediately after the holidays.  It is almost a self-evaluation of ourselves during the past year, and we seek ways to improve who we are and want to be. 

Long-term goals are one hundred percent attainable. However, they must be accompanied with short-term goals that allow us to take the small steps that are necessary to get to where we want. 

When we desire for these goals to be met immediately, we lose sight of those minor yet significant steps.

Without a realistic and practical approach to how your resolution will be achieved, it will be broken.

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How Young is Too Young for Marriage?

Engaged at 21, One Student Shares Her Experience of Impending Marriage

“But you’re so young! Don’t you want to live?” I always laugh when people ask me this. As far as I know, you don’t stop living once you’re married. You don’t fall into a void of nothingness where you no longer do anything.

In fact, I’m hoping not, since I’m engaged to be married soon after I graduate in May, and yes, I’m only 21. I believe I’m lucky. I found the man that I want to spend my life with early, and we both believe that we are mature enough to take the next step.

I’ve always been the classic 21 going on 30. I hate going out, I am a complete homebody, and I worry more about paying off my student loans and getting a great mortgage rate more than anyone I know.

It’s important to note that marrying relatively young is not for everyone. Everybody isn’t ready for a lifelong commitment such as marriage, and when it’s forced, more often than not, it will crash and burn.

Most of us have seen a divorce up close and personal, be it our own parents, a friend’s parents, or a family member. This may scare many from marriage, especially when we are often seen as immature and not fully knowing of the evils of the world.

I’ve felt this myself. My parents married when my mom was 20 and was craving any excuse to escape her own family. They divorced 14 years later, and my mom is always telling me they were simply too young to understand what they wanted at the time.

My fiancé’s parents suffered a similar fate. They were married when his mother was 18, and they divorced 5 year later. She too, tells me that she was too young and looking for what to do after high school with college not in her future.

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Starting Traditions

It is now December and holiday traditions are in full swing. Some traditions are small, some traditions are large, but traditions are traditions. From playing it simple, like making snow angels, to kicking it up a notch, like ice-skating in Rockafellar Center, traditions come into the holiday season stronger than ever before. Traditions can be found at the root of our families. They date back to as far as anyone can remember.

Let’s take my family for example. We’re big, we’re loud, and we’re Italian. Add the holiday season into the equation and you’ll get a whole mess of crazy, big, and loud Italians who love food.

One tradition that my family does around the holidays is that we bake and bake and bake. All the women in my family meet at one of our houses (usually mine) and we bake tons and tons of holiday cookies for our friends and family. By the end of the day, we would have baked over 600 cookies. Sugar rush, anyone?

Then we have to frost and decorate the sugar cookies, dust the linzer tarts, and try not to eat any of the special Italian cookies that our Nonna made. Houses cannot withstand the amount of noise that 13 Italian women who are continuously drinking make. I know my house can’t.

Another tradition that my family does is on Christmas Eve. My uncle thinks that it is good luck to eat all the fish eyes from the fish we make for the meal. He believes that eating the fish eyes will make you smarter for the year to come. I just find it gross.

My uncle does not speak the greatest English, he just tends to babble, and otherwise he’ll speak Italian.

“This is good for you, my girl!” my uncle would say.

After I would decline, he would persist and chace me around the living room with a fish eye on a fork and try to get me to eat it. I do not care how smart I would be, I ain’t eating no dang fish eye.

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College Brings About Change

New Priorities and Circumstances Accompany Senior Year

“These four years will fly by.”  How many times have you heard that cliché? I know I was told that when I entered both high school and college, and it is more of a reality than I ever expected.

As this semester of my senior year rapidly comes to an end, I’ve had my moments of reminiscing about my previous three years at the University. My father was so accurate in telling me that I will enter college as a young girl and leave as a young lady.

Of course, four years ago, I thought he was just commenting on my high school immaturity and little knowledge of the world.  Now, I hope to offer meaningful insight on the “growing up” that takes place during the college years.

I have made so many changes to my lifestyle since my freshman year that thinking of the habits I had back then is quite amusing. The following is the shortest advice I could possibly give about the most common habits that I had during my previous three years of college (most underclassmen probably have them too) and how I approach similar issues today. 

However, I am taking a unique stance by deciding if I am too old for the following habits that I used to consider the norm.

Am I too old for: finding the most outrageous frat or toga party? Yes. As a freshman, dressing up in a bed sheet wrapped uncomfortably around my torso was apparently one of the best ways to meet new people, and so was paying a $10 cab ride to a party where you were so easily identifiable as a freshman that it was basically self-torture. 

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Alternative Press’ ‘Artist of the Year’ Stirs Controversy

How does someone who has been arrested twice in the past four months for domestic assault and injuring his fans deserve an award as prestigious as Alternative Press’ Artist of the Year?

Rock Magazine, Alternative Press, announced that Falling in Reverse, a post-hardcore band, was their Artist of the Year. To a point, music should be just about the music, but when it comes to giving awards, kids are going to start to look up to the band. Lead singer Ronnie Radke is no role model.

The reason this is causing controversy is because Radke has not been a model citizen. Let’s take Radke’s past year step- by- step. In August, Radke was arrested for domestic assault on his girlfriend. In September, during FestEVIL at the Jackson, NJ Six Flags, Radke threw four microphone stands into the crowd at the end of the band’s performance.

There were at least two fans that were hurt with alleged head injuries. Radke was then arrested.

This fall, while touring with Falling in Reverse, an opening band, I See Stars, was arrested for possession of drugs. Radke, a recovering addict, kicked them off of the tour.

The band then begged Radke to stay on tour and offered him their pay. Radke agreed after making them sign a contract of secrecy but then ended up kicking them off the tour again.

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Exercising Indoors Made Possible with Some Creativity

Use Imagination to Keep Cold Weather from Standing in the Way of Staying in Shape

As the temperature drastically takes a turn for the chilly-willies, people are finding it harder and harder to keep up with their workout routines. Everybody is succumbing to the “oh it’s too cold outside to work out anyway” mode.

We have all experienced this mode. We stay in and munch on sweets and watch movies. But who ever said that it is too cold outside to get a good workout in your day?

Last time I checked, no one did.

There are plenty of different exercises that you can do inside (oh yes, we are taking the cold days out of the equation) to keep in shape during the winter. Who needs the gym when you can get your fitness on right inside your dorm room?

Get ready to work up a sweat. Because I know I did.  

I decided, in order to give you guys the best at-home workouts I possibly can, to throw myself into the fire, and try multiple routines myself.

Thanks to the magical and organized world of Pinterest (you know it, it’s addicting), I found some excellent workout routines to try inside.

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University Community Adjusts to Schedule Changes

Superstorm Sandy Causes Professors, Students to Alter Original Plans as Semester is Shortened

It has been almost a month since Superstorm Sandy has hit, and both students and faculty are trying to get back to a sense of normalcy. However, there has been some dispute as to how the rest of the semester will go now that students have a shortened semester.

Some students have had to meet their original deadlines as professors continue to follow their syllabi while others are adjusting and trying not to overload their students.

“My professor has been making adjustments to a lot of assignments, and I had to go to a make-up class, so it has been a bit more stressful because there is even more of a workload than there usually is this time of year,” said Mary Fulco, junior. “I have been spending a lot of time at the library trying to get things done because now I do not have a lot of extra time.”

It is not only the students that have been stressed about the constrained semesters. Several professors have had to change test dates, guest speakers, and revise their syllabi schedule for the rest of the semester.

“For the most part, my courses are following their current syllabi,” says Dr. Stanley Blair, English professor.

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Holiday Season Begins Too Early

Stores Commercialize Holidays Earlier Each Year

Like any child growing up, I loved the holiday season. It meant getting presents, endless trays of cookies and sweets, and of course, no school for two weeks.  The whole holiday season is supposed to be a special time of giving, seeing loved ones, and just an overall sense of cheer. The reason why it is special is that it comes once a year, or at least that is what is supposed to happen.

It seems that over the past few years the holiday season has been getting longer, and every year all of the holidays seem to be becoming more and more commercial, especially Christmas. I started seeing ads about upcoming Black Friday sales in October, and it all seems ridiculous.

Yes, stores do need to advertise in order to make money, but they already know that this is the most profitable shopping season of the year, so why can’t they wait at least until I finish my Halloween candy before they start advertising for the door busters and the one day only Christmas sales?

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Classic Movies Remain Timeless Through Many Generations

Memorable Films Outlive Their Decades, Continue to be Beloved by People of All Ages

Classic movies just never seem to fade away. You all know exactly what I’m talking about. I’m talking The Goonies, The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, Pulp Fiction, Die Hard, Grease, and for the sake of the holiday season, Home Alone, A Christmas Story, It’s a Wonderful Life, and Frosty the Snowman. These movies have a special place within all of us; they are too good not to love.

What’s the big deal about these movies anyway?

Well besides the fact that they are PHENOMENAL, they were passed down from our older siblings and our parents. I remember being five years old sitting around the television with my family, watching That’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas, a movie that my parents had watched when they were kids.

They even watched Frosty the Snowman and Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer when they were young. There is a tradition that comes with each classic movie. How could you not respect such holiday classics?

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