Exactly what is a High School Homecoming?
 

This weekend, my college alma mater is celebrating Homecoming. This involves alumni making a special trip back to campus for all kinds of festivities where the alumni are the honored guests. Of course there is a parade of floats and a Homecoming Queen who must be crowned and the pageantry is spectacular.

And that brings me to think about my high school. Grancey and I went to different high schools in our hometown and we are now fortunate enough to have moved "back home." Therefore, we live in the town where we went to high school. Both of our high schools have Homecoming games every fall. Both of our high schools crown a Homecoming Queen at that game. But what else is there?

We are never invited back to our high school campuses for anything. All of the reunions are during the summer. In fact, I'm pretty sure that if I went back to my high school one afternoon during Homecoming week and wandered my 45-year old ass up and down the hallways I'd be arrested before I could get out of the first building. "Freakin' PERVERT" they'd all yell at me.

So what is High School Homecoming supposed to be?

The football team goes off to a number of away games.... and then comes home to play again.

My 20 year HS reunion was this past weekend and Friday night was the Homecoming football game. I didn't make it to that event.

I could have gone back to the school, which I do want to see since they have put in millions of dollars in additions and renovations. We're invited to come tour it any time we are in town.

A reason to have a dance.

I went to my 25 yr HS reunion about 3 years ago. First I pulled up to the school parking lot, only to be greeted by a suspicious cop (cops are all younger than me now!) wondering why a 40 something dude is in the school parking lot.

I explained that it the 25th reunion (Class of 78, Barrie Central - Go Redskins! Oops they renamed to the Phoenix to be politically correct) and i was just checking out the old digs.

Well, the function was held at the local Barrie Holiday Inn, and was quite good, although the DJ was too intrusive.

It seems that after 20 something years, most folks want to talk, and catch up, rather than dance to old music. After a while, we told the DJ to turn it down a notch, as Matlock was on.

Thanks for the explanation, I never did get what a homecoming was. Sounds weird. I certainly don't want to have regular reunions with ex-classmates in my school...don't see a point, I still see the ones I want to actually continue seeing.

I guess it all depends on the closeness of your high school chums - we've had a 5, 10, 20 and 25 year reunions, all situated around our high school football games. I was able to be present for the 20 year reunion, and we had a tailgate party at the school/football field, where we had friends from other 'classes' stop by and and have a hotdog with us. It didn't matter to us that they weren't from our class - they were friends, so they got a dog.

Did we all sit and watch the game? No, because only one of us had a child in the game. Of course, the coach was a friend of my older brother, so it could have meant more, I suppose.

But the big thing was that we could all get together and see what all we'd made of ourselves. No one cared how much weight we'd all gained, or how much hair we'd lost. We were together again, and that was what was special.

Oh, the joy of being from a small town.....:)

My wife just got the email invitation to her High School reunion which is also it's 200th anniversary (Jarvis Collegiate: http://schools.tdsb.on.ca/jarvisci/ ) celebration.

We thought it would be interesting to go, but then found out it is $60 each to register, then $130 each to go to the event.

We decided that the yearbooks are good enough to look over for the warm and fuzzy memories.