Sophie’s December: Finals, a Disney Christmas, and a Happy New Year

Dear Family,

The month of December snuck up on me, and then finals week quickly snuck in with it. December is such a mixed basket for college students. There are ample opportunities for free food because the campus and various organizations are in a festive mood and professors are sympathetic and extra supportive because they love you and care about your mental health (if you happen to be a part of the English Teaching program). However, there are also final exams and the world outside every morning is a little bit darker when leaving the apartment.

There is also something called the German Christmas Market. Or, well, that’s probably not really what it’s called. I think its real name sounds a little more German, but it’s a German Christmas market that is put on in Salt Lake City every year in early December. Local vendors come and sell their homemade knick-knacks and scarves and Russian nesting dolls and whatever else. And then there are the FOOD vendors, all of which have a long line of people waiting to order leading away from them. 

I had never been to the German Christmas Market before. In fact, I’m pretty sure I had never heard of it until my roommate Savvy, who has lived several years of her life in Germany, invited me to go with her on the first Saturday of December. We drove up to Salt Lake together and spent a few hours almost losing each other in a massive sea of fellow German Christmas enthusiasts. 

I’ve learned that I am not a particularly assertive navigator of crowds. The number of times I allowed myself to be separated from Savvy in the crowd probably got close to the double digits, though I never really lost her, even if she lost me. I just don’t like cutting people off, and I generally feel that I don’t have a greater need to move forward than the person next to me does. 

But, we spent plenty of time together, despite my tendency to wander. Or, not wander, I guess. It was beautiful, fun, and a little magical.

Savvy enjoyed speaking to other attendees in German, waiting in line for authentic German food, and complaining that the food and kinderpunsch at the market were not actually all that authentic. It all seemed perfectly German to me, though, as someone whose only experience with Germany was one night in a hotel and a fair few hours in the Frankfurt airport in between my mission in Ukraine and my mission in Salt Lake. 

After returning home from the German Christmas Market, I was forced to begin thinking about my various final projects whose due dates were quickly approaching. The nice thing about final projects is that you can often start working on them quite early in the semester if you’re motivated to. Some professors even set due dates throughout the semester to motivate you to at least choose your topic before a week before the end of the semester.

If you’re me though, you don’t really make much of a dent in your final projects until the week before the end of the semester, no matter how many times you have considered working on them throughout the months leading up to that. 

One of my final projects I really didn’t work on until the night before it was due, and I didn’t complete it until about ten minutes before I had to have it done. But I had it all under control and was not at all stressed, because this final was for my Young Adult Literature class (ENGL 420), which was probably my favorite class this semester.

The class was meant to expose us to a wide breadth of YA literature and was a required class for English teaching majors. Theoretically, I’ll have the opportunity to teach some of the novels I studied in this class in my own classroom someday, and I’m excited for some of my next classes to teach me how to actually do that. 

The final for this class required each student to send in a profile of herself as a middle or high schooler, including significant life events at that time, a description of our interests, and a list of books we enjoyed at that age. Each student would then receive another student’s adolescent profile and was tasked with creating a bookshelf for the student with at least six book recommendations and explanations based on the unique interests and circumstances of the student. 

While this was not a particularly challenging final, I appreciated how applicable it was, and how enthusiastic my entire class was about it. We presented all our bookshelves on the last day of class in the style of a middle-school science fair. We each brought a trifold poster board with our book recommendations and were encouraged to walk around the classroom whilst eating pizza and drinking root beer. 

The environment was a great representation of everything that I love about the English department at BYU. The faculty, I have noticed, are loving and encouraging, and all enjoy an opportunity to have fun and encourage learning in applicable and unique ways. The more I learn about education from BYU, the more motivated I am to become a teacher and provide enriching and enlivening learning experiences for my own students someday.

After a few other final exams and projects, I flew home on Tuesday of finals week. Luckily, I was able to get almost all of my work done before then and I fully enjoyed having no responsibilities for two and a half weeks. 

I spent a few days at home, then on Friday we packed up the Toyota Highlander and drove to Orlando, Florida in order to spend a week at Disney World over Christmas. When I first heard this plan, I was skeptical that we would really enjoy being in a crowded theme park in Florida on Christmas rather than in the comfort of our own home close to extended family. 

We left the house somewhere around three in the morning, and I was impressed that my siblings and I were able to keep a conversation going for close to two hours before passing out. 

This was a good sign for the rest of the trip, since it showed me that we were likely all capable of getting through hours of physical discomfort with high spirits and good conversation. In years past, there have certainly been vacations that consisted of irritated interactions mixed with grudging silences and a fair amount of frustrated crying. As much as we love each other, we can get on each others’ nerves sometimes.

My apprehensions about Disney World, however, ended up being needless. It was a magical time, and while we didn’t feel the need to wait in line to see any princesses besides Edna Mode, I thoroughly enjoyed being in such a happy atmosphere over Christmas. One of my favorite moments of the trip was in the Magic Kingdom on December 23rd. It was dark, we were standing by an enormous Christmas tree, and, remarkably, little white specks of something began to fall from the sky. 

I will not say that I was fooled into thinking there was actually snow falling in Orlando, but as someone who loves snowfall better than any other weather, I was happy. It’s not quite as magical to just see snow falling instead of feel it—with a cold nose and hands and your skin feeling tight because of the dryness from the freezing temperature—but it was still lovely. 

Other favorite moments from the trip include our friend Alp, who we met in line for the Peter Pan ride. He thoroughly enjoyed saying, “Hello! How are you?” to anyone near him in line, but had some trouble continuing any conversation beyond that without help from his father, who seemed to feel abashed when his son bothered other people in line. 

Grace and I were happy any time he chose to talk to us though, and my attempts to make conversation with Alp and his father at different times while waiting in line made Grace say, “That was so missionary of you,” which is a comment that always makes me a little happy. 

Another happy Disney attendee was a woman with a cute Animal Kingdom backpack, who, when asked by my mother where she got her bag, apologetically reported that it had been a gift and that she did not know where it came from. My mother, unfazed by this setback in her search for a cute Disney World backpack for herself, let the woman go on her way and continued her search elsewhere. 

Hours later, as we were preparing to leave the park, this same woman saw us standing around and tapped my mom on the shoulder. She explained that she had asked her mother where the backpack came from and discovered that it had been purchased from a gift shop near the entrance to the park, around the corner from where we were. My mother thanked her and we parted ways from the woman again. 

It’s a silly little thing, but that interaction between my mother and this woman we didn’t know at Disney World made me so happy! It reminded me of the countless interactions I’ve had with other women that showed me that someone cared enough about me to think about me for even a few seconds outside of the time I was interacting with them.

I know that not all women are the same or would do something like that woman at Disney World did, but I love talking with other women and recognizing the questions we feel we can ask one another, or the information we are willing to share. 

I remember a moment last semester when a boy complimented a dress I was wearing, and I said, “Thanks, it’s my roommate’s.” He kind of laughed, shrugged, and said, “okay.” He observed that women seem to enjoy sharing where their clothes are from. We don’t seem content just accepting a compliment, we feel the need to give some explanation.

Like I said, I don’t believe that all women do this, or that other people never do. But I just think it’s the cutest thing that we want to share that small tidbit of information with fellow appreciators of our clothing. And I love that, when someone likes something we have, we care enough about sharing it with them that we take the time to tell them where we got it or, in the case of the woman with the cute backpack, to find out where it came from in order to help a sister out. 

I doubt I adequately explained the feelings and thoughts that the lady with the backpack prompted, but I assure you that she made my day.

It was already a good day, of course, as I was in the Animal Kingdom. It had potential to be a less than great day, seeing as I was recovering from a fever that I had the day before. Luckily I was mostly recovered by the time I was expected to walk around the park, but I was still in a daze for a large portion of the day. Grace reported later that anytime she asked me how I was doing, I responded, “I’m great,” while staring at the floor and shuffling my feet. 

I didn’t quite feel capable of eating, nor did I really have the energy to smile most of the time. I remember being acutely aware of the fact that I likely looked pretty unhappy to anyone who decided to look at me for any amount of time. I look happy in the pictures though, and I was having a good time. Acting happy is simply far more exhausting than feeling happy some days, and I think the latter is generally the more important of the two, if you have to pick between them.

On our last day in Florida, our parents suggested we visit Cocoa Beach as a final relaxing activity and a chance to see the ocean before spending most of the next day in a car for the drive home. This sounded like a fine plan to still-kind-of-loopy me, as it required no pushback on my part to go along with my parents and look at the ocean in Florida, which I hadn’t ever done before. 

Grace, however, wisely posed the question: “Is this addition to our trip something that will make our family happy?”

It was a poignant question to consider, and we would later realize that it was one we should have considered a little better. Sort of like those questions in the Come, Follow Me manual that are meant to be pondered while studying the scriptures—we heard the question, appreciated it, recognized that asking it would probably lead us to make better decisions, and then moved on without really considering our answer to it or exerting the cognitive effort required to come up with a personally applicable answer. 

We quickly realized after getting in the car to drive to Cocoa Beach that Orlando traffic is terrible, beaches are far away from the middle of the state, and Ari and I still had bad enough coughs to make being in the same car as us feel kind of disgusting. No one expressed this last part out loud, but I could feel it. 

So, did the trip to Cocoa Beach make our family happy? I mean, I don’t think it made us remarkably unhappy. It was pleasant. I was still a little loopy, so I was just following my mom in a daze. The water was pretty.

So, with that showstopper to top off our magical holiday excursion to Florida, we promptly exited the state early Friday morning and magically arrived back in Maryland fourteen hours later, without my having to do anything. It was excellent.

I finished the year off, still in Maryland, celebrating the New Year with the Eskelsens. In the hours leading up to the ball drop, we watched Sing and the Barbie movie, educating ourselves in all sorts of important ways in the last few hours of 2023.

Here’s to good movies, good people, and a good year.

I hope that the last few hours of 2023 will not be an indication of my level of productivity in 2024. Seeing as it has taken me until January 6th to get this last letter out, it’s not looking too good.

I also hope that you will all have a wonderful month and that you have the chance to tell someone where you got an article of clothing from sometime soon.

All the love,

Sophie