The holidays can be an exciting time of year, but that is not always the case. Not everyone eats big meals or has lots of presents wrapped and waiting for them under the tree. Not everyone can take part in a happy, festive gathering of family and friends. In this article I would like to address both, but first I would like to start with my holiday wish list.

Wish List:
I would love for you to get your students to commit to logging in one hour of physical activity every day during the holidays. I would love for them to get their heart rates up from 165 to 185 beats per minute for at least a third or more of that hour every day. I would love if the activities they choose are fun and include others.

I would like them to recognize that, often, healthy activity can be part of their necessary routine like mowing the lawn or cleaning the house, but that fun activity should be something they try to schedule too. I would love if each student reaches out to someone at school, maybe several someones, and invites them to be active alongside him or her, whether the activity is physical play, working out in a gym, or shoveling snow off the sidewalk. And I would love if all of you reading this have something special in store for your holidays, too.

My next wish is a bit self-serving. It is that you would consider putting the second edition of COMPLETE PHYSICAL EDUCATION PLANS FOR GRADES 5-12 under your Christmas tree. Why do that, especially if you already have the first edition?

Because:

• The second edition has three new chapters: Field Hockey, Lacrosse, and a unique three-unit chapter in Education, Gymnastics, and Dance. Now there are 18 chapters of team, individual, dance and gymnastic, and fitness chapters all in one place.
• The Fitness Testing chapter has been expanded to include both a skills-based test with norms for each age group and the Fitness Gram and its national health standards.
• Each chapter has a student study sheet ready to be printed and handed out.
• When a lesson introduces a new skill, the warm-up has a step-by-step progression that is technically correct so that students learn the proper body mechanics from the start.
• Every lesson of folk, square, and social dance includes the instructions, broken down to musical phrases that can be easily learned and followed by both teachers and students.
• The CD-ROM now uses a full page design so that print-outs of tests, study sheets, and lesson plans are professional in appearance and ready for immediate use.
• Illustrations have been improved to be more visually helpful.
• A lesson finder index makes searching for lessons focusing on specific skills or strategies easy.
• In short, as a reviewer said, the second edition does everything but teach.

Healthy Holiday Practices:
Now that I expressed my wish list, let me go on. Last year my article focused on changing the mindset of kids who “veg” out with abundance, and do little or no exercise to counteract their caloric indulgences. My point then, as now, is that the “vegging out” has become all too automatic. People eat more than they need without a second thought. By intellectualizing the process - identifying the habit, figuring out the cost in calories, and the amount of sweat necessary to burn them off - I think we have a chance of altering such automatic and self-destructive behaviors.

I suggested trying to begin the intellectual process last year, but at the time I thought it was too close to the holidays to coordinate it correctly in order to achieve our goals while at the same time serving the interests and curricula of each department in school. For instance, one way to create awareness is to learn how tough it was in the past to get, store, and prepare food, and how it was eaten sparingly as a result. Looking back fifty years or more, there did not exist the abundance of food we see today. Now I think, Just Do It. Just get started. This is how:

The history department can set the time period on which to focus. They can research the typical meals of the era and develop a menu based on their research. Physical education students can be the gatherers. Home economics students can attempt baking a cake or making candy in the type of oven that was indicative of the chosen time period, or they can try dealing with raw ingredients that have yet to be processed. Imagine them baking in a fireplace, or cooking unprocessed grains, or slaughtering the family turkey.

Math students can figure out the number of calories a typical person consumed on a daily basis, and specifically at holiday time. Science students can calculate how much labor (in calories) it took to do the chores that preceded getting the meal on the table. After a project like this, students should have a different sense of the value of food. They should also acquire a role model, however theoretical, to compare themselves to, one quite different from today’s overeating peer group of friends, most of whom don’t even do the dishes anymore.

Why stop at research? Celebrate the way our forefathers did. That would mean novel games, a town-like country dance, carol singing, distinctly different foods and gifts. The process could get every department in your school involved.

Sadly, there is another health issue, the kind we rarely mention when talking about healthy holidays.

Some of us suffer more during the holidays than at any other time of the year. Whether the cause is loneliness and isolation, the bittersweet memory of a lost family member or good friend, suffering due to an economic hardship, or the black hole of depression which leaves individuals feeling as if things will never get any better and just not worth the struggle anymore.

We are physical educators, not psychologists, but in class we deal with people issues too. People work together in physical education. The better they work together, the better the experience for everyone. Perhaps this season, we physical educators can emphasize the social aspect of people working together. Perhaps we can encourage our students to include a classmate in their holiday plans, one whom they never thought to include before. Perhaps this season as students create their activity logs, they can be encouraged to log in the names of the people with whom they shared the activity, and they can be encouraged to participate in groups more often. Perhaps this season we can teach our students to be caring members of the community to which they belong.

Have a very happy and healthy holiday and a wonderful New Year.

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