It’s Thanksgiving! This has always been my favorite holiday. I love the cooking and eating and nondenominational status. I love feeling grateful. I love spending the day with my family, whomever it may happen to be that year.
My freshman year, all the stragglers from Wilcox Hall in Bean East piled into a couple cars for a very Springfield Thanksgiving. I had a group of friends who lived off Fifth Street and Harlow Road. By the time the feast came around there were about 20 random people, including the five guys and one girl who lived in the house, someone’s mom, the out-of-staters from the dorms and all our visitors, plus this one guy I’m not sure anybody knew. We ate at the table and at the counter and on the floor. We had stuffing and mashed potatoes, but we also had Miller High Life, which the vegetarians politely sipped. After dinner a few of us gathered around the python’s cage to feed him a Thanksgiving rat.
Our hosts were all originally from Oakridge, and the guests were from all over the place. For many of us, it was our first Thanksgiving away from our families. I’m sure many of the Emerald’s readers are going through the same first this year. So all you out-of-staters, as you jealously watch the mass exodus of students driving just a few hours home this weekend, remember that Thanksgiving is what you make it. Make it a good one.
One year we had an all-girls Thanksgiving where we watched “Sex and the City” and drank cosmos while everything cooked. We also made phallic symbols out of the rolls and triumphantly screamed when we used our own strength and ingenuity to remove the gizzards from a turkey that refused to defrost. We broke all the Thanksgiving rules. We made fried zucchini and ate it before dinner. When the turkey came out of the oven we picked at it until it was ugly, because there was no one to swat our little hands with a spatula. We didn’t even make dessert because Rasool from Duck n’ Go had given us an enormous plate of baklava and the biggest pumpkin pie I’d ever seen. I think he was proud of us for making the whole meal by ourselves.
If you have your own kitchen, by all means, try to cook for Thanksgiving. Invite some other people you know can’t go home and do whatever you want. If you don’t want to cook a whole turkey, don’t. Get a chicken or a turkey breast and roast the heck out of it. Or hey, call it a current events holiday, skip the poultry all together and congratulate yourself on avoiding the avian flu. Don’t be scared by the tradition and expectations of the meal. Make what ever foods you are thankful for.
If you are going to a friend’s house, remember you are there to represent your own family, so bring something to the table, literally. Maybe it’s your Aunt’s famous perogies, or maybe your family eats Tofurky. Figure out how to make it and introduce a new group of people to the joys of your own weird traditions. After all, you’ll be enduring theirs.
If you’ve got nowhere to go, fear not. You can always go to the bar. Max’s is having a potluck dinner. If that’s not your style, the Friendly Street Church Fellowship Hall is having a free meal at noon for “all with no place to go for the holiday.” See if you can make a dish, or help out at a retirement home dinner. You can also volunteer at a homeless shelter and help people who don’t have as much to be thankful for.
The bottom line is this: Thanksgiving is the best holiday. It’s all about gluttony and love and sharing. Be thankful for whatever you have, and express it in your own way. But do try to spend the day with someone else. Everyone is compatible on Thanksgiving. Now might be the best time to get any bad karma out of your system; afterwards, you can take a nap.
The possibilities for a Thanksgiving away from home are endless. I imagine a group of guys somewhere trying to shoot a frozen turkey through a basketball hoop. I see people playing video games while their Stouffers dinner bakes away. I bet there is someone out there who watches the Food Network all day, then gives up and takes the gang to Marie Callenders. Some type-A would-be chef is neurotically checking the poultry thermometer every five minutes. I’d love to sit in on a vegan Thanksgiving some year.
I will never forget my first Thanksgiving away from home. It was the epitome of this very American holiday. There was a whole bunch of us with totally different lives, but we all had one thing in common: We recognized the need for a gathering. I hope my friends from Springfield, wherever they are now, don’t forget to feed the snake and realize how thankful I still am for the year they fed me.
Happy Thanksgiving, University of Oregon.

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