The Most Wonderful Time

A lot of students are pretty distracted right now in this final week of classes. Harvard is buzzing with holiday parties, extracurricular transfers of power, and epidemic influenza.

With all this on-campus excitement, and the promise of home looming, who can think about school right now? There is so much on our minds right now that it would be all too easy to completely forget about that last midterm. Hopefully our TFs also share in our seasonal charity and goodwill, but I wouldn’t count on it.

This is why Harvard’s idiosyncratic calendar is a good thing, and why students will come to miss January finals when they eventually disappear. In addition to making us feel both elitist and victimized (a winning Crimson combo if there ever was one), our hellish Januaries permit our relatively fun Decembers.

No one is honestly doing that much school work right now. We are free to soak up the holiday cheer—or at least sleep off that nasty cold. Cruel and bitter January is the appropriate time to lock ourselves in our rooms and study for 16 hours straight. Right now, we should all be mainlining spiked eggnog.

Our December leisure also helps local businesses: Harvard Square was mobbed with shoppers last weekend. I, too, was casually perusing some stores. I spotted Steven A. Franklin ‘10 in a bright red Santa costume, soliciting donations to the Salvation Army. Steven was a really nice guy, but he could be such a goober sometimes.

Franklin’s incessant bell-ringing attracted little to no attention from passers-by. Everyone was much more taken with the one-woman protest going on just down the street.

Never afraid to add some spectacle to her fierce displays of idealism, Maya D. Simpson ‘11 was engaged in an inspired bit of performance art. She would first throw handfuls of Monopoly money into the air. Then, when pedestrians unsuspectingly bent to pick it up, she assailed them for their crass materialism.

I approached her and said, Maya, it’s pretty obnoxious of you to keep tricking these people.

“I’m not tricking them,” she snapped back. “It’s the big corporations that are tricking them. Tricking them into thinking that money can buy happiness. This retail hysteria makes me sick.”

Come on, don’t be such a grinch. There must be something you want for Christmas.

“There are two things on my list: a bullhorn and The Anarchist’s Cookbook.”

Some people want to make Christmas cookies and potato latkes. You want to make Molotov cocktails.

“No, I want to make a difference, and being loud about it is the only way I know how.”

As if by example, Bennett C. Braddock III ‘08 suddenly strolled by. Merrily, he shouted, “Your mom’s a HO HO HO! Happy holidays everybody!”