Ah, Thanksgiving. The ultimate family holiday, bringing you, your parents and, if your family is anything like mine, 57 of your extended relatives together since 1621. I spent my first 18 Thanksgivings road-tripping to Philadelphia in order to accommodate my dad's North by Northeast fam and became quite accustomed to Borkan family traditions: Grandma overdoes the turkey, Uncle Eric overdoes the wine, my dad nurses a beer he secretly hates the taste of while he feigns interest in a football game he couldn't care less about, and my sisters regress severely in order to find playmates in our much younger cousins.
Last year, however, this all changed. After making one too many treks down to the City of Brotherly Love with my aunt and uncle, the last of which involved an uncomfortable and borderline explicit debate on homosexuality with my uncle (who is apparently the Devil's advocate himself), I decided maybe I should start going home to Ohio for Thanksgiving and I got a taste of what Thanksgiving break in college really means.
Once you leave for college, the focus of Thanksgiving shifts from family to old friends, but I would argue that the holiday only becomes more traditional; the phrase "old habits die hard" was invented for the weird, transient five-day déjà vu most of us will embark upon tomorrow. For three months, high school is fairly irrelevant to our lives. Sure, we still do the things we did back then, but now we do them with different people and drunk.
For most of us, there is little to no intersection between Tufts and that distant dream that was our adolescence. All we seem to know how to do when we return is to pick up where we left off, but in a far more concentrated manner; we need to fit a quarter of high-school ridiculousness into a mere five days. The break is a reminder that your chance to do whatever it is you didn't do in high school didn't die at graduation, but has simply been hibernating the key word here being "do."
You know what I mean: Thanksgiving break is full of the inevitable and unexpected as exes are reunited, unrealized crushes are brought to fruition and unrequited love is finally requited. This effect is only intensified if your crowd didn't drink in high school, because chances are that you do now and will want to do it together. After one beer (and years of baggage), latency becomes blatancy; outrageousness can only ensue.
It's unavoidable, so just savor the crazy. Freshmen, don't read this column and think you can get around it if you had any friends in high school, just wait. By this time next week, you will have gotten back together with your ex, watched your friends do the same, hooked up with your "platonic" buddy or at the very least, had disturbingly old-school thoughts about your high-school beau/friend with benefits/prom date/calc teacher.
Don't worry, you will hop back in the DeLorean and return to college, both physically and metaphorically, but there will always be next Thanksgiving. Last year, I purposely ran into my ex-boyfriend and discovered that since we broke up, he has dated both an actual stripper and a guy. Awesome. In recent days, I have found myself Facebook stalking and obsessively thinking about my date to our eighth-grade formal. A case of Thanksgiving break fever? I think so.
