My fiancee and I go to Indiana University together, I'm just finishing my undergrad in a couple of weeks and she's about to start grad school. Ironically, we both come from the same neighborhood, and in HS we lived about 3 blocks away. It's fortunate for us that we can at least go home to the same town every holiday. However, we both hold jobs, and so when we get home it's usually for 3 days max. The entire time home is spent driving. And it seems like every x-mas after we get back to Bloomington, we swear we'll never go home for x-mas again, that it's just too stressful and too much work. Every year though, we just duck our heads and push through it. We hate that it has to be that way, and my dad and stepmom make the holidays easier by scheduling their festivites around our schedule, but it's still a hassle to visit my dad, my mom, my grandparents, her parents, her extended family... usually all on the same day, and everywhere we go people complain that we can't stay longer. We wonder why we continue to go home even though all we hear the whole trip is that we never stay home long enough.