If you’re reading this hot off the press, you must have missed the bus to Boston, or maybe Mommy doesn’t want you home for Fall Break.

I’m in Montréal preparing for Canadian Thanksgiving (which is not, as most Americans believe, an imaginary holiday). If you find a ride home, you’ll honor Columbus on Monday. I’ll be eating turkey with my grandparents in manifest observation of the “action of grace,” as we call it in French.

It’s not Christmas, but Fall Break nonetheless fills me wit the kind of illicit joy I get from drinking skim milk straight from the carton and walking around my apartment naked. Days off are so wrong, but they feel so right.

As all productive members of society are prone to do, I’ve always secretly marked the passage of time by the welcome holidays, breaks, and vacations that punctuate the calendar. I like the legitimate cover they give me for sleeping past noon, drinking beer at unrespectable hours, and indulging in What Not to Wear marathons on TLC.

This guilty joy can be traced back to my pre-Labatt days. As a child of Québec’s particular brand of civil society, I was raised as a secular Catholic. I went to a private school run by nuns, but I never went to Mass on Sundays. I got the guilt without the punishment.

It is from this upbringing that I inherited an odd sense of holiday propriety. Because I was never properly punished, I attributed all holiday mishaps to the divine, wrathful intervention of God Almighty. On His special days of rest, He was always there to dole out the chastisement I wasn’t getting weekly in the pews. In 2nd grade, the nuns told us that Santa wasn’t real-the day before Christmas vacation. The year I won a 4-foot tall chocolate Easter bunny in a drawing contest at my Dad’s office, it broke as soon as it got home. These were interpreted as signs of divide disapproval.

God’s reach even extended to the pagan celebrations on the Christian calendar. Before I came to Cornell and discovered that Halloween was but a thinly veiled excuse for animal-themed Playboy outfits, God had wracked me with holiday half-guilt.

As anyone who grew up in Canada, the Northeast, or Siberia can attest, there’s usually snow on the ground by October 31st (or at least there used to be, back in the pre-global warming days). God declares open meteorological war on Santa by making trick-or-treating as prohibitive as possible for anyone on Arctic territory.

My mom, apparently hardened by her own years of guilt, used to openly defy the heavens by buying us XXXL Halloween costumes that could be squeezed over our ski suits and long underwear. I have only frostbite scars and obese Minnie Mouse pictures to show for these outings. From such formative experiences, I gleaned that God disapproved of me collecting Tootsie Rolls on snowshoes. I hadn’t earned the privilege. I didn’t take it every Sunday.

In recent years, my brother and I have expressed outright defiance on God’s own turf, staying home on Christmas Eve while the rest of the family trudges to Mass. We drink copious amounts of beer and play heathen games like poker and Monopoly. Even the presents can’t assuage our unresolved half-guilt.

I can’t speak for Carl-Eric, but the only holidays I am truly able to enjoy are others’, untainted by Québeco-Catholic guilt and weird childhood memories.

Cinco de Mayo is a personal favorite. In high school, wearing Dollar Store sombreros and drinking virgin margaritas at the On the Border in the Vernon Hills strip mall was a ritual pure and untainted by divine half-guilt.

Rosh Hashanah is quickly moving up the ranks as well. I am told that it is the holiday of repentance. Last week, I got to celebrate de facto Rosh Hashanah by virtue of having many Jewish classmates. All of the class cancellations left me with lots of extra time for naked milk-drinking. There was, however, no repentance because there was no guilt. My God wasn’t on watch.

Despite linguistic commonality, He apparently doesn’t have jurisdiction in France either. My year among the francophone cousins taught me celebrate their numerous national breaks without any half-guilt.

And if anyone should be feeling completely guilty about taking a day off, it’s the French. They have no fewer than eleven national holidays. All of these conveniently happen to fall either on a Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, thus justifying the “faire le pont” practice, whereby extra days off are inserted to “make the bridge” to the weekend, thus creating jumbo-long, mega-sized long weekends. But these extended celebrations of New Year’s Day, Easter, Labor Day, Victory in WWII, Ascension, Pentecost, Bastille Day, Assumption, All Saints Day, Armistice Day, and Christmas represent but a fraction of France’s calendar of guilt-free breaks. The national observance of the entire month of August, cumulative cigarettes breaks, and the five hours of productivity erased from the legally-mandated 35-hour work week round out a perpetual schedule of R and R.

There should be some guilt racked up there. There is none. Zéro. The French thoroughly enjoy their days off, Blackberrys stowed away. God lounges on a nudist beach on the Côte D’Azur and leaves them alone.

It is, therefore, almost too painless to engage in repeated observance of their national holidays.

Maybe it’s the lingering memories of a guiltless year in France. Maybe it’s the decade I’ve spent in the United States, removed from the Québéco-Catholic incubator, but I feel no guilt for the Godless Thanksgiving I will celebrate.

I feel no remorse for NOT thanking God for the bountiful Canadian harvest or even for my many cross-border blessings.

Instead, I thank the good people at the Ithaca Farmer’s Market for picking delicious corn and onions.

I thank the forebears of North American democracy for creating a free society in which this heretical tract can be published.

I also give advance thanks to the people who run Hell if it turns out that I’m wrong about the God thing. Go easy on me during the holidays.

Andréa Girardin is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. Shecan be reached at agirardin@cornellsun.com. Raisin d’étre appears alternate Fridays.