The concept of vacation/holiday (or lack of one)
When I was a kid, the concept of a family vacation was one of two things since my father only got two weeks off a year.
The first was the annual family reunion with my father's extended family that happened every summer. They went to the same campsite every year, and the adults spent a week visiting with each other. The kids, on the other hand, tried to stay out of trouble.
This event still goes on to this day, but I have no interest in it.
The second was the annual deer hunting trip. My father would pack up the trailer and drive to the mountains, we’d pitch the tent, and every day we’d hike up and down mountains hunting deer. The unfortunate part about this was that my father was a horrible hunter. I don’t recall us ever getting a deer on one of those trips. Normally, he would go back out on weekends with his cousins from the summer family reunion (who were better hunters), and they’d shoot a deer for him.
And that was it. In my mid-teens, I started meeting people whose families actually went on vacations to different places. I learned how they would discuss where they wanted to go and what they wanted to do, and it was different each year. It was such a foreign concept to me.
As I moved into adulthood, I began reading business newspapers like the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) or the Financial Times (FT), and each would have a section just before summer highlighting various (wealthy) people and what they planned on doing for their summer holiday.
They would ask all of them the same questions: where they were going (usually some posh resort or private residence), what they were reading (usually a pop psychology book on leadership or a novel by a writer I’d never heard of), and what they do to relax, among other random questions.
They would do this for both summer and winter holiday seasons.
I would read each of those with the fascination of an anthropologist studying an unknown culture. (In truth, it was a different culture because I had grown up poor.)
Fast forward 40 years, and I still don’t know how to vacation.
But what I do have is a model on how to vacation.
So, should the FT or WSJ come calling this year asking me what my summer holiday plans are, I’ll be ready.