24 Things That Happen When You Visit Home For Christmas As A Real Adult

1. You take a deep breath of the fresh, suburban air and realize how polluted the city you live in actually is.

2. Your body goes into shock from having a well-balanced, home cooked meal.

3. You can’t find where you insert quarters for laundry, so you throw a handful of change in the washer machine for good measure.

4. The furniture and memories from your childhood bedroom have disappeared and more of your parents’ weird belongings keep showing up in your old space.

5. Your mom finagles you into doing all of the chores you used to do for her, even though you haven’t lived in the house for a good two years.

6. You end up being designated driver for your parents on the way home from the neighborhood Christmas party.

7. You freak out when you realize you don’t have to pay to park, when you can’t get an Uber within five minutes, and when you can’t just walk ten minutes to the grocery store at any given moment.

8. You resort to sibling bribery to get them to drive you places because you don’t have a car anymore. You literally would sell your soul to your little brother to get him to drive you to the after-Christmas sale at Express.

9. You run into your old friends that decided to stay in your hometown. You also meet their new husbands and babies, too.

10. You go to your favorite restaurant and order your favorite thing on the menu and are shocked that it still tastes the same.

11. You decide to see what Tinder or Bumble is like in the suburbs and then immediately regret it when you accidentally swipe right on your old high school gym teacher.

12. You find clothes in your closet from years and years ago, and decide to try them on. You then decide that you had horrible taste in fashion when you were 17 and that you need to lose a good 10 pounds.

13. You become a personal IT manager for your parents by setting up all of their technological gifts they received, not to mention configuring their WiFi password into something other than “password123.”

14. You forget how conservative your family is and they don’t really appreciate your cute new habit of sprinkling swear words into your everyday language.

15. Watching Nightly News turns into a two hour screaming match with your parents about womens’ rights, the war on terrorism, drug regulation, immigration, civil rights, etc.

16. You run into your high school ex and their whole entire family at church and you want to run away, but you need Jesus in your life more than ever because Lord knows you’re on the naughty list this year.

17. Your mom INSISTS on taking a family photo and makes it sound like someone is going to die in the next year if we don’t take the damn picture that you end up having to redo like 7 times because Dad keeps blinking and your brother refuses to smile.

18. Your family starts questioning your sexuality more than you did that one drunken night at that college bar based on your never ending status as being “single.”

19. You realize you can actually drink with your younger siblings and you end up getting drunk in your parents’ basement watching cheesy Christmas movies in your pajamas.

20. Speaking of getting drunk – you and your grandma got lit at Christmas dinner, and you’ll forever cherish the memory of dancing and singing with her to the song “S&M” by Rihanna.

21. One of your little cousins pukes. It doesn’t matter which one. One of them pukes every year from eating too many cookies before dinner.

22. You probably end up puking, too. You try your hardest to puke as quietly as possible so your parents don’t realize how drunk you actually got during dinner.

23. Your parents still play “Santa” even though you and all of your siblings are over the age of 18 and some are even married at this point. You don’t really care, because mom and dad are cute as hell.

24. You realize that even though you’re older now, things have changed, and Christmas doesn’t always have the magic sparkle it did when you were a kid…it still is a special time of year and you’re so glad to be home.