For four straight years, homecoming was the best holiday of the year.
Homecoming in our town of Newton is a right of passage for high schoolers, and one I learned was incomparable to many others’ experiences from people out of town. Other communities don’t have a parade, or a pep rally, or a court in many cases.
As I reminisce of the days of youth, I think about homecoming as something almost perfect like a setting out of an 80s movie, but better because it was real. It’s a combination of Red Pride, a winning football tradition and a peak in adolescence, a fleeting innocence.
Just like today, the weather was the same - always a little chilly, brisk, yet sunny in a way that made for the perfect fall homecoming weather - jeans and a Cardinal sweatshirt from Drug Town, maybe gloves and ear muffs on a few occasions.
The memories of homecoming are just as vivid now as they were 10 years ago and I hope they don’t fade over time.
When the school bell rang on Friday afternoon
Everyone, teachers included, spent the entire day present but unproductive. It was a day of celebration and unity, or at least how I remember it. By 2:45 p.m., you were itching for that bell to ring. It was the most simple memory really but we had been anticipating that moment all week. We had a game to win and we were ready.
The old hallways of Newton High School, covered in school spirit, banners and signs, never cleared out so fast, and if I made a movie about it there would be a few pieces of red and white confetti on the ground and a banner only hanging from one side because someone had hit it. It was that distinct.
Packing into a vehicle to litter the town with toilet paper
And the sense of glory that came with knowing we were free to do so. TPing is a harmless and fun tradition, a thrilling one for a well behaved teenager. Wearing layers of clothes, buying bulk toilet paper at the lowest price and rushing around a friend’s yard to color it white, that’s what we did.
Some years we got more clever with our ‘decorating’ by including plastic forks and window paint to our list but I always preferred the toilet paper. As an expert thrower, I still remember you throw a roll paper-side up so that it could take flight and soar through the air. How else do you efficiently get a roll of paper over a pine tree? People from Newton know how.
Which has me thinking how strange it is some towns have to encourage such wild behavior while others must discourage it. We were lucky growing up.
A sense of accomplishment from building our class float
Maybe our class was lucky to get along so well but I found it rewarding to work together on creating our class float for the parade and the way we stuck together in the gym pep rally. Everyone was so busy doing their own thing that some classmates would have never become well acquainted if it weren’t for float building.
Looking back, and maybe I knew it then, one of the best parts of homecoming is the unity it creates amongst your classmates, your school and even your town.
In high school, and even in adulthood, we’re limited by cliques and statues. Maybe it’s a group from work you feel alienated from or an old friend who has found another friend group but there’s an innate sense of belonging that is violated when you’re a teenager.
But in a way, homecoming was an attempt to put all differences aside so that we can see the common ground among us all.
Each graduating class and each generation have different memories and traditions for homecoming. My mom told me her class white-walled the town and had to clean it up the next day. Our class impossibly put a giant Little Caesars sign on the rock balcony outside the cafeteria windows.
If anything is true is that those memories are irreplaceable whether its for the Class of 1971, Class of 2003 or Class of 2015.