Not everybody is fortunate enough to have a long break at this time of year, though. Emergency workers are often at their busiest now looking after the rest of us, and there are many others still in the office in essential industries needed to keep the country running.
For these people, their vacations are still to come, although it is to be hoped they have had at least the odd day off here and there to help recharge the batteries.
As summer digs in across the South this week, with sweltering temperatures throughout Central Otago and parts of Southland, many of us can relate to the Lovin’ Spoonful’s Summer in the City, with its line about the "back of my neck getting dirty and gritty". However, in parts of Central, it will be more a case of the heat shimmering up from the ground and burning the ankles.
There will be some this year who did not book a holiday elsewhere in the country because of fears their plans might be scuppered by a sudden lockdown following a Covid-19 outbreak. For them, a "staycation" was a far more appealing prospect and far less likely to be disrupted.
There is nothing wrong with holidaying from home, as long as the usual patterns of life at home are changed in some way.
Taking day trips, embarking on a new hobby or a project there hasn’t been time for during the year, cooking different kinds of foods in different ways, having friends and family to stay — these are all good ways of changing the routine and using a different part of the brain.
And there are the slower rhythms of the summer day to enjoy — the early morning walk, a home-made coffee, an afternoon nap which goes on too long and leaves you confused as to which day it is when you wake up, a cheeky gin-and-tonic when you’re cooking dinner, a long evening in the garden and late cricket on the telly.
For some, nothing beats the classic Kiwi summer holiday, hitching up the caravan to the car, or putting up a tent, or pulling into a motel. Fresh cherries bought from a roadside stand, a paddle in the local creek, an ice-cream melting down your hand, a beer with the neighbours at the camping ground.
Even without the ever-looming threat of Covid-19, the rush to the Christmas holiday break-up is a particularly stressful one in New Zealand. Unlike our northern hemisphere counterparts, where the Christmas-New Year mid-winter shutdown lasts for just over a week, here we have a concatenation of Christmas, the end of the working year and the start of the long summer holidays to contend with.
Wherever, or whenever, you go on holiday, the important thing is the conscious uncoupling (to coin the slightly loopy phrase used by celebrity Gwyneth Paltrow when she separated from Coldplay singer Chris Martin) from the everyday routines and the work stresses which can grind you down.
Part of that conscious uncoupling is getting away from the relentless news cycle and its never-ending delivery of mostly grim Covid-related stories. There is far more "news" these days, if you judge it purely by quantity rather than newsworthiness, because of the insatiable demands of online sites and their readers.
Most of the "breaking" stories we are informed of breathlessly would not have made the "news-flash" cut a few decades ago.
After the vicissitudes of the past year and the sense that everything is beyond one’s own control, organising and taking a holiday are affirming because they allow you to take back some of that influence over your own life.
Robert Louis Stevenson was right when he said: "To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive."
