Holidays as focal points

I don’t like Christmas holidays. I mean I have nothing against Christmas and New Year – they are wonderful festivals. I don’t like Christmas holidays because it’s one week in the year when pretty much the entire world has holidays.

And this makes it difficult to plan a holiday. Unless you’ve planned British-style and booked your hotel three months in advance, it is not easy to get room in quality hotels anywhere at this time of the year.

It is similar with the holidays around Dasara in October. It may not be a worldwide phenomenon like Christmas is, but it is a phenomenon that affects a large portion of India. And that makes it hard, once again, to plan holidays and go to places that are not going to be inundated with tourists.

In contrast, I love summer holidays because they are so long (between two and three months depending upon your school) that not everyone goes for vacation at the same time. Consequently, unless you go around long weekends (such as Easter or May Day), places are easier to get and not as crowded as well.

Until we had a kid, we tried as much as possible in being contrarian with our holidays – go when nobody else is going. Now that we have a kid (though not too big, but she goes to school), we tend to look at the school holidays as anchors as to when to go for a vacation. The last two holidays (the Dasara holidays in October and the Christmas holidays starting later today) have been a bit of a washout on that count because on both counts we didn’t plan early enough (and even if we did, we can expect pretty much every place to be choc-a-bloc with tourists in these times).

On the other hand, in August, the daughter’s school gave a week off at a time when pretty much no other school in the country had given vacations. That was brilliant, and we did a beautiful holiday then, booking less than a month in advance but getting a great but non-crowded place. Then again, I guess my daughter’s classmates who have siblings in other schools would have faced problems at that point in time.

In any case, going forward, we’ve decided to do what parents of other young children tend to do – not bother about child’s classes or “attendance” and go for holidays whenever.

We should simply stop planning holidays when everyone else is planning holidays!

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