Why Are There So Many Guides to Holiday Hometown Hookups?

It’s a universal truth that there isn’t a whole lot to do in one’s hometown. There are, however, plenty of aggressively normal-looking people to do, and therein lies the crux of why the holidays in your hometown are the horniest time of the year. If you are one of those people who peaked in high school (my condolences), you’re reminded of your glory days, and if you did not peak in high school, you’re thrilled — perhaps even aroused — by the opportunity to flaunt how much hotter you are now. I get it! There’s a reason the internet is rife with guides and listicles of the dos/don’ts of holiday hometown hookups — this is the freakin’ Super Bowl for some people.

But may I just ask: Is an extensive catalog of step-by-step, detail-ridden guides for something as innately simple as a holiday hook-up really necessary? If I managed to figure it out when I was 20 and still too awkward to send a standard “U up?” text, I’m confident any adult with a cell phone signal could figure it out, without micromanagement from VICE, HuffPost, Cosmo, or LifeHacker. (All great publications! We love you!)

I give you below an incomplete list of what I found when Googling “How to hook up holiday hometown?”:

• The Dos and Don’ts of Hometown Hookups (Glamour, 2014)
• HOMETOWN HOOKUPS 101: WHERE TO F-CK, RED FLAGS AND MORE (Hype Bae, 2022)
• How to Have a Delightfully Messy (And Safe) Hometown Hookup This Holiday (VICE, 2020 — which is fair, because, hey, fucking during the pandemic was a whole minefield.)
• Hometown Hookups: The 5 Guys to Encounter When Home for the Holidays (HuffPost, 2017)
• The Right Way to Use Tinder for a Hometown Holiday Hookup (LifeHacker, 2023)
• How To Have Drama-Free Hook Up With An Old Flame Over Christmas (Bustle, 2019)

This isn’t me discouraging you from leafing through any of the above guides and finding pearls of wisdom. (Thank you, Hypebae, I did not consider that I could bring a rando home to my parents’ house for sex, and they won’t notice or hear anything so long as I turn on a white noise machine!) But it isn’t exactly rocket science to get railed during one of the horniest moments of the year — when we collectively have nothing to do but rot in our childhood homes, feel all kinds of feelings about the past, get very drunk, and wistfully watch each other’s Instagram stories. We aren’t in the aughts, or whatever year Love, Actually came out, when holding up all those giant signs on someone’s lawn was necessary. Like, just pick up your phone?? There’s no need to fear rejection; you’re leaving in a few days anyway — be free!

A 2017 article in The Atlantic posits that “surfing [Tinder] on a trip back home can be a way of regressing, or imagining what life would be like if you never left.” Sure. Or it can also be a way of reeling in some casual, mindless dick while in the throes of horny boredom in your childhood bedroom. It’s not always that deep. Until it is (hopefully).

For me, personally, the holiday-hometown itch to fuck anything that walks and also reminds me of innocence ended after college. There’s nothing like adulthood and employment to ensure you’re so worn down that going home means nothing but eating your mom’s food and sleeping for 12 hours a day. But I still look back fondly on every holiday hometown hook-up in the back of a car; in empty church parking lots; empty school parking lots; the parking lot of that one water park; abandoned garages; abandoned nature trails; abandoned strip malls; and so on and so forth. In fact, I hope to have more someday because there’s really no experience more timeless or quintessential. (I’ve yet to be able to recreate the intimacy of watching my childhood friend-turned-hometown-hookup dump a condom in the trash bin outside my former elementary school that one cold January evening when I was 20.)

All that and more could be your experience — and, I promise, you need not read any of the guides linked above for the Christmas quickie you covet. In the words of Michael Gary Scott, or whoever invented this timelessly relevant proverb/acronym: KISS — Keep It Simple, Stupid. That’s the only guide you need, baby.