• The holidays have been endured, for endurance is required to finish the year. For Bear River High students, January offers little cause to celebrate and ample reason to be grouchy. It is a dull, cold month; many of BRHS’ students are experiencing jet-lag within their own country. They wake up at least eight hours earlier than they’d usually arisen during the holidays. People are literally having holiday-withdrawals. No longer do sugarplum visions dance in our heads. No longer do we eat six meals a day and fill ourselves with gallons of soda. No longer do we see our relatives and remember the origin of our oddities. January, with its dirty snow and biting temperature, must be most untimely month of the year!
    My sister, with all the wisdom of her seventeen years, observed the madness of ending festivities with the end of New Year’s Eve. Last year, she marched proudly into the family’s kitchen and announced that we were all to not shave our legs for two weeks. “Leg Shave Day,” as she declared it, would put an end to all our celebration-less problems. Beginning from January 1st there would be no shaving of legs until January 12th; those who went without so much as putting lotion on their legs would participate in a great brunch where deep-fried pickles were the main dish. We all thought it as eccentric an idea as would do our family justice. So we tried the make-shift holiday. Apart from Mom, we all made it to the twelfth with relative ease; we love deep-fried pickles.
    The 2009 Leg Shave Day Extravaganza is apprehended with enthusiasm. I wear shorts in gym class, happy to display the fruits of my labors, my older sister debates with my mom what the menu ought to be for the brunch, and the family hopes that Mom will not shave her legs on the 11th this year. It is a successful deviation from the monotony of January’s white skies and tan landscapes. Perhaps vain people do not approve of the lack of hygiene, but what care we for hygiene when there is amusement to be had?