The concept is simple – stay home and relax instead of traveling to experience someplace else. Perhaps this is something we should have been doing all along – a couple of weeks off to spend with our family in the comfort of our own home sounds a lot more appealing to me than the crowds at your tourist trap of choice. Sure, you might not be able to see the Grand Canyon this year, but that time spent enjoying your own back yard which you spend so much time maintaining, or reading that book you’ve been meaning to might not be such a bad thing after all.

To be honest with you though – I don’t believe this concept is at all a new one. Sure, the term was recently coined, but the concept was not. All my life I have known family and friends to take weeks or months off of work to work on their own projects and enjoy their lives. Perhaps this term is really just for those who are used to taking vacations who feel somehow wronged by their current inability to get away to someplace wondrous.

I suppose for the rest of us we can still say it’s not that bad as long as our recession lexicon only gains words such as “staycation” instead of words like “Hooverville.”