Holiday Season of Changes – Commentary by Kevin Klanderud
As we approach the holiday season this year, we all look forward to those family traditions that we have come to love. Our family is no different, but this year we are experiencing many changes and challenges from our normal activities because our son is away at college. Now that he is not in town, it takes a lot more effort to make plans to get everyone back home together for our traditions. We have been finding new ways to plan our family holidays, including various means of communication, such as Skype, FaceTime, text and email.
It seems like the younger generation nowadays doesn’t use a cell phone as a phone; they use it for texting, FaceTime, Snapchat, Twitter, watching videos and surfing the web, along with the many other apps and software that are out there. Now in order to get a response from our son, we have to put together a text or email, send it to him and wait. He is usually free to get back to us between 10:00-11:00 pm if we are lucky, so this has made it a lot more difficult to make our plans.
We also have to find out when he is done with classes and when he will be available to be picked up to come home. (Oh yeah, our son doesn’t have a car at school so we have to help figure out how he is getting home and then back to school.) Typically it has been us driving there to pick him up and then driving back home, and then we drive him back to school and then drive home.
Well, our holiday traditions of having our family together to celebrate is over. Everyone made it home and enjoyed eating great food, sharing stories, watching movies and spending time together.
As you can see in this year of changes, we have had to come up with new and exciting ways to finalize our plans to have our family together for our holiday traditions.
From our family to yours, whether you have had changes this year or not, we hope you have a happy, healthy and safe rest of your holiday season.
Kevin Klanderud is a Communications Specialist at Lime Valley Advertising, Inc.
