It’s the holiday season! Time to roll out the Charlie Brown-and grandma-approved holiday clichés!  You know, “Thanksgiving is the season for giving thanks.” You grandmother recites it as a mantra during the holiday season—usually expectantly, after she’s given you another dubiously knitted gift or unwanted cooking lesson. You may have stammered it years ago in your 4^th grade Thanksgiving pageant, decked out in tufts of politically incorrect feathers and your little sister’s Pocahontas costume, parading your parent’s tax money/tuition before a full audience. As Squanto you were thankful for interracial friendship, your stereotypical face paint, and the smallpox you would develop upon returning to your wigwam. As an elementary student you were only thankful for what might appear on a standardized test in the hopes that you wouldn’t be the tenth little Indian “Left Behind.” 

Of course Thanksgiving became about more than giving thanks years ago. It’s now about food comas, television specials, and, presumably, family. We watch corporate commercialism and terrifying balloon inflations of cartoon characters drift through Manhattan. We plot our early Black Friday mall raids and rise before dawn to join the annual Running of the Overfed American Consumers. We fight with our parents, our siblings, our cousins, and our grandparents.

I’m not about to play your fourth grade teacher and trot out tripe about the “real meaning of Thanksgiving,” telling some historically fuzzy tale about a Pilgrim and Native American New World ho down. I wouldn’t even rain on your (Macy’s Thanksgiving Day) parade with my awful history major truths about the bleak realities of the first Thanksgivings, which, in jolly Calvinist fashion, were days more devoted to religious devotion than to feasting and occurred only after the Plymouth colony had buried half of its inhabitants. But I bet your elementary school teachers didn’t tell you that. Church and death don’t usually enter our elementary school curriculums—unless, of course, you attended a Catholic school, where they teach martyrdom right along with math.

I won’t even urge you to “make a list of the things you’re thankful for!” We all did that in elementary school, when our lists probably included an enumeration of our favorite gadgets, references to our pets, and maybe a nod toward mom and dad. Our current lists probably wouldn’t be any less superficial. Yes, I’m thankful for my family, my friends, my health, my education, and Bryn Mawr’s generous financial aid, but I’m also really thankful I won that eBay auction for the those Oxford ankle boots and that Erdman now has Cocoa Crispies. I’m thankful for the meteorological quirks that have made November in Pennsylvania so unseasonably pleasant.

I’m also extraordinarily thankful this Thanksgiving will not be like my last, which was, to be honest, an disaster. I naively flew home to Ohio for an 84 hour whirlwind of family, schoolwork, friends, schoolwork, shopping, and, well, schoolwork. How bad was it? Well, I brought Henry James to Thanksgiving dinner at my aunt and uncle’s.

Still, despite my glut of schoolwork, I managed to enjoy a decent holiday—at least until I tried to return to Bryn Mawr Sunday morning. Two days, one cancelled flight, three airports, two misses classes, one daring rescue of my luggage off a plane bound for Virginia, and one fatal cell phone fall later, as I dragged myself and my suitcase through the snow down North Merion Avenue, I vowed I would never fly home for such a short break ever again. To make matters worse, during the two days I spent ruminating in germs in airport lounges and airplane cabins, I contracted a virus that would land me in the hospital—twice—and home on quarantine a week before the semester ended. Clearly the universe was trying to tell me I shouldn’t have gone home that weekend.

True to my promise, I’m not going home this weekend. In fact, I’m not going anywhere. I am holing up in my dorm room with a large amount of cereal and an even larger amount of homework. Of course, my decision to stay here isn’t entirely motivated by my understandable terror of airport bathrooms. With the personal income of an allowance-receiving ten-year-old (despite holding three jobs), I really can’t afford to fly home for Thanksgiving, particularly if I just did so Fall Break. Also, if I’m going to be spending more time with Charlemagne than my family, I can’t justify the expense or the hassle of going home—or anywhere, to be honest. Charlemagne and I can just hang together at Bryn Mawr and eat our dining hall-pilfered cereal in peace.

Facing a comparatively lonely and unfestive Thanksgiving, I’ve had to recalibrate my expectations for the holiday and reevaluate my thanks giving. I may not be home with my parents, sisters, pets, high school friends, and extended family over Thanksgiving. I may not be able partake in the family tradition of assembling and decorating our fake Christmas tree the day after Thanksgiving. (Don’t laugh: my father is convinced real Christmas trees are prone to spontaneous combustion and therefore the root cause of all house fires.) And I may not be able to partake in frantic Black Friday shopping. But at least I won’t have to explain my vegetarianism, aversion to almost all Thanksgiving food, and lack of significant other to a flock of curious aunts. And I wouldn’t have to navigate the chaos of “the biggest traveling day of the year” or risk being trampled while waiting in line for electronics at Target. In fact,  I’m actually looking forward to my quiet, academic Thanksgiving. I’ll just be thankful if I can finish my art history paper.

Smith, a sophomore history major, can be reached at lmsmith@brynmawr.edu.

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