Does staycation really exist?

Right now I am on vacation. At least, officially.

This week I was having an English class and at some moment of the conversation, I told my teacher that I was on vacation. He made that classic pause, looked at the screen, noticed that I was exactly in the same home office as always, same background, same chair, same picture on the wall… and he not only corrected my word choice, but also used the moment to teach me a term that, honestly, I thought was a joke: staycation.

At that moment I laughed. I thought it was some modern joke, one of those invented words that appear in ultra mega blaster business LinkedIn posts. But very calmly, he shared the screen and opened the Cambridge Dictionary. And to my total surprise… the word really exists.

Staycation is literally vacation at home. Vacation without traveling. You take time off work, but you don’t take a plane, you don’t pack a suitcase, you don’t face airport lines, you don’t sleep in a strange mattress. You stay. At home.

I found this very curious, because I always learned that “férias” in English was vacation. Simple like that. One single word. And suddenly there is a specific term for when you are on vacation, but you don’t travel.

This made me think if this word is really common in the daily life of native speakers or if it is more contextual, used only in some situations. I also ask myself if it is an old term or if it appeared with the pandemic, when many people started to redefine what rest really means.

In my case, it makes total sense. I will not travel. I will stay here. I will staycation. Enjoy the house, the pool, the beach, my wife and my daughter. Ok, I live in Florianópolis and this helps a lot, but no big plans.

And of course, like always, there will be space for books, runs, some chess games and those Home Assistant experiments that start simple and finish at two in the morning, praying to not break anything after a restart and needing to reinstall everything like I did last week.

For me, vacations were never really about going to some place. It is more about leaving the autopilot for a while. Even if it means staying exactly where I already am.