Taking my Christmas vacation!

I've recently had a lot of flashbacks, memories of when I first moved to Lebanon for my first year in university, memories of when I moved to France last year. All these big changes in my life were for one purpose : "Making my opportunity window wider"

I recently had a presentation for an English class and in that presentation we had to talk about our summer vacation.
After hearing the whole class talk about their vacation, my turn came. I had a small paper with a basic structure and key ideas of the things I wanted to talk about written on a small paper.
As I was standing in front of the class, all worked up, I started the speech with this phrase : "First thing's first I had no summer vacation.."
During that speech I got a bit carried away with what I did this summer and at the end I talked about my goals.

After that I realized that it's been 2 years since I spent Christmas with my family. I haven't taken a real vacation. I always worked to "widen my opportunity window". I recently achieved my biggest goal for this year which is being completely independent from my parents.
Now that that's done, I am taking my Christmas vacation this year and seeing my family and friends.

(too bad I am not going to be able to see a person I was really counting on seeing and someone who was real support in rough times, but I'll manage to make it up, that's another goal!)