Winter break, for a lot of us, symbolizes a lot of different things. It could mean cold nights in with your family or that special someone without needing to worry about classes, it could mean getting nice new gifts for Christmas, for many religious people it marks the birth of Christ on Christmas, but one thing it marks for every student is one that we all dread: The end of the semester.

Second term has the most breaks out of any of the other quarters of the year, with it having new years, thanksgiving, and a slew of other holidays, we find ourselves with some time off, and knowing that as soon as winter break ends the end of the semester is just a couple short weeks away, it would only make sense to do whatever work you need to catch up on in your classes. I mean, it’s the perfect time for it, with all of that free time that could just be packed with productivity. Being productive over the break is exactly what we all did too, right? Wrong. I’m sure many of you, like me, spent hours of your free time browsing Netflix, watching shows you were barely even interested in, until you eventually needed food and water to sustain yourself, before just going back to doing basically nothing again.

Everyone I know keeps talking about how behind they are and how much work they need to make up. This is normally followed by talking about how little they actually got done during the break. I want to be that guy and judge them for not doing what they needed to get done, but how can I do that when I watched literally every season of Kitchen Nightmares in one sitting even though I had just as much to do as them?

We all have our lazy moments and winter break seems to be a large series of lazy moments, and that’s okay. One of the great things about winter break is forgetting about all of that stress and just enjoying time with your family or your friends. We all need to give our brains a break every once in a while and I’m sure many will agree with me when I say, high school is extremely exhausting in a mental/emotional way. Is it good to be unproductive? Not particularly, but the point is you shouldn’t feel bad for recharging and doing nothing but binge watching cooking shows that star a particularly vulgar British chef, because we all need to recharge every once in a while. So work hard, get those grades up, get this bread,  and wait for the next break to come so you can finish all of those other series you’ve started but haven’t finished.