This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.
BLOG: Frozen winter break
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
In the spirit of the holidays, I chose to write about the winter break, which is dwindling down as we speak. I will come to the “frozen part”, later.
With the snow covering our area with a pretty scene, I wish to share some personal thoughts and reflections about indoor activities during the winter break.
I am not talking about school winter break — the lovely, long vacation time for students — and a well-deserved time off for their parents. The nice thing about school break is that the streets get much emptier and driving becomes less stressful. There are no large, yellow school buses cruising the roads and stopping every few hundred yards and no children around street intersections and along sidewalks. Driving certainly becomes more relaxed, especially in areas with rough winters (eg, my home state of Michigan, when snow and ice plague the roads this time of year).
This is also a special time of the year for college students, their families and the local residents of their college towns. For college students, especially those who are from out of town, it gives them the opportunity to spend some time with their families in their home towns. Parents of out of town college students certainly enjoy the winter break as their children visit home during the break.
Winter break also provides a brief break for people living in and around college towns — the winter break provides an additional opportunity for emptier streets around campus. In my case, not only do I live close to campus, but I also work on campus. Our school, Michigan State University in East Lansing is considered one of the largest campuses around the country. The majority of town residents are Michigan State University students so during the winter break, the town is 50% emptier.
We feel how empty the campus is during the winter break. Driving around campus is less stressful; because the Michigan State University campus is so vast, we often have to drive between different locations on campus.
I am not talking about school or college winter break but rather, about the winter break for non-students — for grown people like us, who go to work every day, Monday through Friday, and after hours and on weekends. We long for time off to break the work routine. In this regard, we are just like school and college students. For us this winter break occurs in the beginning of winter in the form of two consecutive 3 to 4 day breaks for the holidays and New Year’s.
Unlike spring and summer holidays which are usually outdoor breaks, the winter breaks are usually suited for indoor activities. In addition to family gatherings for Christmas, people go to the movies and other indoor outings.
My family went to the movies on Christmas Day and saw “Wonder.” I think it is a must-see for families — our children are beyond school-age but we all enjoyed the movie. The movie is fictional and based on a novel by R.J. Palacio which follows a theme about bullying in school. It is also about the virtues of parents’ fighting for their children no matter who they are or how they look. The story is also about kindness, love and compassion. I am not sure how normal it is to shed tears in movies but during this movie my eyes teared up on multiple occasions.
Another family in-house watching was an episode of the BBC’s spectacular “Frozen Planet.” This show is one of our family’s favorites: Besides the crisp video display, I was intrigued by the motherhood instinct in the polar bears and penguins of the northern and southern poles of our planet. Hence the word “frozen” in the title of this post. Literally most of the Midwest and Northeast have been frozen over the winter break. Record temperatures (eg, 50 degrees below) have been registered in some places. In mid-Michigan, we registered some single digit temperatures.
Another watching for me while working in the basement-office is the movie “The Doctor,” which I have been watching multiple times over the winter break on Amazon. I have watched the movie now and then over the last decade or so. “The Doctor” stars William Hurt and is a 1991 movie based on a true story by Edward Rosenbaum. The reason that I’ve seen the movie multiple times after the first watching is because I am working on a book on empathy in health care and patient-doctor relationships. In the movie, a famous and affluent cardiovascular surgeon in a big city hospital was diagnosed with cancer of the larynx. After going through a rocky course, with diagnostic and therapeutic interventions, including radiation and surgery, he was cured of cancer. The experience transformed him from an arrogant, non-sensitive, non-empathetic and non-emotional doctor to the exact opposite. Once he experienced being a patient he realized what patients go through.
The last show I would like to share that I’ve had the opportunity to watch/listen to during the winter break was the Christmas episode of NPR’s Car Talk, on December 23. According to NPR, the Car Talk show began in 1977 by brothers Tom and Ray Magliozzi from Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2014, Tom passed away at age 77 years. The live show then ceased but NPR has been rerunning episodes of the show in memory of Tom Magliozzi.
I have been listening to the show for several years on Saturdays as I do household errands. Callers call in with troubles with their cars and the brothers will answer the questions with a humor that is informative and funny. The majority of callers join in on the fun and each caller brings in a life story around his or her car trouble. The two brothers are Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineers who had a car repair shop in the greater Boston area since the early 1970s and began the show on public radio in the late 1970s.
In the Christmas episode of Car Talk, a lady called in about a smell in her car that was so puzzling it would only come if she moved in one direction. She thought the smell was coming from the rear exhaust but the brothers’ hypothesis was that the smell was due to an oil leak into the engine which was burning and causing the smell. The caller testified that she has noticed that the oil would not last as it used to. One simple suggestion was for her to get out of the car and see where the smell was coming from.
Those were some reflections for 2018. Happy New Year to all!