Connect
Sponsors
Currently Reading
-
Terms
The Book Lady's Blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Reviews and articles posted here are property of The Book Lady's Blog and are not to be posted elsewhere without permission. Please contact me if you wish to post any of my work, or any excerpt thereof, in any other location or format.
Miscellaneous
Meet Bookrageous!
Technical Stuff
Design Credits
Oct
07
Looking forward to falling back: The evolution of a sacred tradition
2009 at 11am Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky
It started freshman year in college. Fall 2001. My husband (who was, back then, not even my official boyfriend) and a few friends and I found ourselves awake earlier than we would have liked on the Sunday morning after the “fall back” change that ends daylight savings time. We’d gotten that glorious extra hour of sleep, and we wanted more. But we were hungry.
So we hopped on the El (I went to college in Chicago) and headed to Clarke’s on Belmont (open 24 hours a day) for the most perfect of Sunday morning meals. Then we went back to our dorm rooms, and, whether we intended to or not, spent the rest of the day napping and watching crappy B movies on TV. (It helps that Fall Back Weekend, as we’ve come to call it, usually occurs near Halloween, which means the B movies are plentiful.)
None of us read a single page or did a lick of homework. For one beautiful day, we just basked in the glow of Chicago in the early fall and practiced the fine art of doing nothing.
So Fall Back Weekend became a tradition. We began looking forward to that early morning trip to Clarke’s and the sheer laziness that would follow. Four years in a row we did this, and each year, it became a little more special.
Then we graduated. And we scattered.
Bob and I moved to Lawrence, KS, home of the mighty Jayhawks, for me to attend graduate school. Paul moved to Washington, D.C. Heather ran off to seminary at Princeton, and Anna got married and moved to Syracuse, NY with her new husband. So when Fall Back Weekend rolled around, Clarke’s wasn’t really an option.
Bob and I planned to celebrate the weekend anyway. We got up early and went out for breakfast, then returned to my apartment and watched movies in bed for the rest of the day. We ate junk food. We took naps. We unplugged the phones. And I pretended, for once, that I wasn’t a busy graduate student with hundreds of pages to read for class the next day.
It seemed we were on our way to creating our personal, couple’s version of Fall Back Weekend.
And then in Fall 2006, Bob was offered a management position with his company, but he’d have to move to Richmond, and quick. So we spent Fall Back Weekend making a mad-dash trip to our future hometown to find him a temporary apartment, and we nearly missed our flight because we forgot to turn the clocks back in the hotel. Not such a restful weekend.
Fall 2007 was our first Fall Back Weekend in our new house in Richmond, and I don’t really remember the particulars. I’m sure we slept in. I think we cooked breakfast at home because we didn’t really know where to go. It was relatively unremarkable.
But between Fall Back ’07 and Fall Back ’08, I started blogging. And I wrote almost every Sunday about spending the day in my pajamas, enjoying the quiet time and nothingness with the guy who had become my husband. I had also taken a new job and was starting to feel the stress, and man, did I ever need a relaxing weekend. So we planned the most epic Fall Back Weekend ever, and we decided it would begin on Friday night with a trip to the grocery store to stock up on junk food and would not end until late Sunday night, when the last crumbs were brushed off our jammies, and we were so filled with our gluttonous laziness that we couldn’t move anymore.
Now, Fall Back Weekend 2009 is just 3.5 weeks away, and I won’t lie. I’ve been looking forward to it since the spring. Life has been busier this year than ever before. I’ve worked harder. I’ve read more. I’ve put in many hours being an awesome aunt to my nieces and nephew here in Richmond. And just this week, I’ve begun preparing to start a new job.
So I need a break, and I don’t care that Halloween happens to fall on Fall Back Weekend. If the kiddies want their candy, they’ll just have to deal with the crazy lady who answers the door in pajamas she has clearly been wearing for several days, telling them they’re lucky she even got off the couch to give them their treats.
On Friday, October 30th, hubby and I will make that awesome trip to the grocery store where we spend a ridiculous amount of money on a cart full of food that is bad for us. Then we’ll hit Blockbuster for some silly DVDs, go home to slip into our PJs, and settle in to eat brownies for dinner. We’ll unplug our phones. We won’t answer email. We’ll only go online for entertainment. We’ll read. We’ll sleep. We’ll eat a lot of crap.
And we’ll spend 48 hours enjoying our quiet time together, remembering the eight Fall Back Weekends in our history, and looking forward to a lifetime of them to come. It’s going to be great.
You should try it, too. I know it’s not as feasible for folks who have kids, especially on Halloween weekend, but I really encourage you to take even one day if you can to very actively do nothing. It’s refreshing. It’s fun. It nurtures your relationship. It is the very best kind of quality time.
Let me know if you’ll be joining me for some portion of Fall Back Weekend. Everyone needs an excuse to relax every now and then, especially if you’ll be participating in the 24-hour Read-a-Thon the weekend before. So come on. Get lazy.
No related posts.
Love it! Definitely sounds like something worth looking forward to! I need to consider this idea.
What a fabulous idea! I have kids, but I think they’d get a kick out of this!
Great idea!! And I’m sure my kids would be thrilled to watch tons of TV and eat brownies all day!
p.s. Are you talking about Richmond, VIRGINIA….my home?! I would be very excited to know one of my favorite blog authors lives nearby!
I love the fact that I already know this about you. It means I’ve been reading your blog and it’s been a part of my life for awhile.
Have the best time!!! I can’t think of a better weekend than halloween for it!
It sounds lovely. And what’s this about a new job??
Like I really need a weekend to hang out on the couch in my jammies and eat junk food? Dude this is the best.event.ever!!
Regardless of that it’s certainly a great way to hang out with the hubby and the puppy for some quality time. Have a great weekend
Great idea! I’ll talk to my husband about this, though he doesn’t like sitting in front of the TV for hours on end. Me, on the other hand…I can watch a whole season of a TV series and not even get a sore ass.
Oh, you are just too cool! I would LOVE to do something like this. But alas, the kids would not tolerate our laziness on such an important weekend. Maybe once they move out? I can remember weekends before they were born where we would pull the mattress in front of the big screen TV and watch Godfathers all weekend. Ah! Those were the days!
I bet we could still do this since Daniel is so young, and I bet it wouldn’t be too hard to talk my husband into it. Maybe we can go to the library and get a bunch of seasons of TV shows, eat crap, and play with the baby in our pjs.
You mean that fall back this year falls on Halloween weekend? Ugh.
I will try my best to be a lazy butt but it probably won’t be possible.
I’ve always appreciated “fall back” for the extra hour of sleep on Sunday, but I love what you’ve done with it! My stepkids aren’t with us that weekend, and I suspect my husband could go for this. I don’t think we could do 48 hours of it, but Saturday afternoon into Sunday is a possibility. Thanks for the awesome idea!
Sounds like an AWESOME tradition!! And I WILL be doing the read-a-thon. Maybe we’ll pack our kids to Grandmas for the night and do our lazy weekend that way. Oh, to dream…..
I love reading about this tradition of yours! Hope it’s great!
Florinda, if you can do all 48 hours, I highly suggest it. I can’t even begin to tell you how much I enjoy and look forward to this each year….but of course, whatever you can do will be great. Glad you’ll be kid-free for the weekend!
That sounds like the perfect plan! I figure if Bob and I ever have kids, we’ll just raise them with the tradition, and when they’re old enough, we’ll let them help pick out the crappy movies and junk food.
What a fabulous tradition! I loved your story of how it all started, too, and it’s wonderful that you’ve been able to continue with it. I’m not sure it’s quite as feasible around here, but I’ll most definitely be thinking about you that weekend!
This is an AWESOME idea! And congrats on the new job! I hope you’re still a book lady!
So it turns out that hubby has conference finals for swimming on Friday and Saturday, but I think we’ll still do it after that.
We did something like this for Christmas the year before last – it was just the two of us, and we thought, why not do what we want? We had pizza, onion rings, spring rolls, tater tots, and waffle cookies, and we watched Elf and Bad Santa. And you know what? It was actually terrible! We decided never to spend a day eating nothing but junk food ever again! At least we enjoyed the movies.
Brilliant. I think we’re going to have to implement this idea.
[...] been less than a month since I went off the grid for my annual Fall Back Weekend, but here I am, ready to do it again. I’ve been playing to take the rest of this week off to [...]
[...] of my least favorite days of the year. I detest “spring forward” as fervently as I love Fall Back Weekend, and I want my hour of sleep back, damn it! It will take me at least a week to adjust to the time [...]
[...] of you who turned your clocks back an hour last night enjoyed the extra sleep. This weekend is something of a sacred tradition for Bob and me, as we go completely off the grid for more than 48 hours of uninterrupted laziness. [...]