The family dinner table can really put everything in perspective, especially during the holidays. Take Christmas 1992, for example.
1992 was the first year my parents spent at home while both their boys were away at college. For the holidays, I came home from my senior year at UC Irvine, my brother from his freshman year at Harvard. I can’t remember a time I’ve ever seen my parents so happy as that first night at the dinner table together.
My brother and I liberally swapped college stories. He and his Harvard crew teammates had just beaten college archrival Yale. And his dorm neighbors had recently voted him as the student with the most deplorably unkempt dorm room.
Apparently, my brother was on quite a winning streak as a Harvard freshman.
I’d just been hired to run the UC Irvine summer orientation program for incoming freshmen, a job I’d been coveting for three years. And speaking of accomplishments, my roommates and I had always wanted to see if we could stay up all night playing video games. Two weeks earlier, we’d climbed that Everest and reached the summit.
It’s important to set goals if you want to be successful in college.
My parents never asked us what grades we were getting, or what we planned on doing after graduation. They didn’t tell my brother to keep his room clean or me to throw away my video games and opt for a good book. At that dinner table, all that mattered to my parents was that their two boys were home from college.
Wherever your kids go to college—from Harvard to Haverford, Duke to Denison, Georgetown to Juniata, Princeton to Purdue—they’re going to come home for the holidays and sit down at your dinner table. And as long as they have stories about how much they’re loving college, I think you’ll find that the names on their college sweatshirts really won’t matter to you all that much.
In fact, you’ll probably find as you sit together this holiday season that the “C” on the geometry test and the SAT score that didn’t quite break 1800 and the room so messy it could rival my brother’s dorm room won’t seem nearly as important as the time you’re spending together.
Dinner tables really can put things in perspective.
Thank you for reading, and happy holidays.