It's spring break here in Saint Paul. Today, The Other Ones by Lee was about that topic:
It got me thinking about how Charlie Brown's family, back in the era when I was growing up, probably didn't go anywhere on spring break either. Families vacationing during spring break was not a thing in the 1960s or ’70s, as far as I remember. But it definitely seems to be a middle class thing now.
I don't know when that started. I'm sure it was gradual, and as the comic points out, when it happens, it's a class-bound occurrence, which coincides with racialized groups.
Cheaper air fares, post-deregulation in the late 1970s, helped to bring it on. The idea of airports being overrun with families traveling at spring break (or Thanksgiving, or any other time) still seems alien to me, as someone who never flew until I was in my mid-20s.
But it isn't just about flying: People could have driven back in the day. The idea that you would go somewhere with your family in March was not a part of American culture back then, as far as I understood it. Working people didn't have the time off from their jobs to do that, even though their kids weren't in school. Maybe relatives visited each other for a long holiday weekend, but that was it.
Spring break was so much not a thing that I don't even remember that we had a spring break from school. The only times I remember hearing about spring break, so-called, were in a few films about college students, and the book (George) by E.L. Konigsburg, which takes place in Daytona Beach and has a plot point dealing with college students. But school children traveling? Never.
It seems as though the creep of expensive travel by families rose with the arrival of Disney World and the general Disneyfication of childhood.
If I can offer a grand, barely thought-out hypothesis, it parallels or maybe precedes the wedding-industrial complex, which has led to destination weddings and now bloated destination bachelor and bachelorette parties, with hundreds of people condemned to fly all over the world to show they care about another person.
Late capitalism needs to create reasons for people to spend more money they don't have, and people need to fill the empty hole in themselves with more stuff and more experiences in places away from home, whether real or unreal.
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A past post about "The Other Ones."
2 comments:
Is taking a plane trip on spring break -- with younger kids -- a thing? I don't know that people around here do that. If Mom is a SAHM, she might take the kids to see cousins nearby, something like that. I'm now remembering a time when a friend and I loaded a total of 5 kids into her van and set out for Utah, that was quite an adventure. Her kids were all very prone to car-sickness. I can't imagine anybody around here loading up the kids for Hawaii or Disneyworld for spring break, unless it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing.
I actually did take a trip this spring break; my 19yo niece who was unable to visit at Christmas got a cheap fare out here and so my mom and I took her and my younger kid to the Bay Area for a few days. We got an Airbnb, it was highly fancy. (Well, the Airbnb was right under a BART track in West Oakland, practically at the port, but STILL.)
I don't know if it's younger kids, but definitely school-age kids. At least older elementary, middle school for sure. I'm not sure what age the kids in The Other Ones (or Peanuts, for that matter) are supposed to be. Maybe 5th or 6th grade?
I think of the difference in my own adult life, with DN3.1. I don't remember that we went anywhere before 5th grade, but we definitely did, starting when she was in 6th, some of it regionally by car, but some farther by plane.
Whereas in my own childhood, even in those later years, I'm pretty sure there was little or no vacation-oriented travel at spring break among my schoolmates.
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