'Thanksgiving is on a Thursday this year," I wrote in a third grade essay. "My entire family is coming over to eat and watch movies. This year, we're having 50 people, eating turkey and watching Home Alone."
Over the years, Thanksgiving at the Kramer household has changed in some respects. This year, we're only having 20 people. We moved to Tofurky, so everyone gets a drumstick. Luckily, though, our taste in movies remains the same. This year, we'll be stuffing ourselves in front of Elf, The Wizard of Oz and White Chicks.
For many students, Thanksgiving will be the first time this semester to go home and see family. For others, who have been going home for weeks to do laundry and make Target runs, it's not as momentous, but it's still a much-needed break from work and dorms and 2 a.m. caffeine and chocolate runs.
Whether you're at home this weekend, or at a friend's house, or even wandering around Philadelphia, you probably have some things to be thankful for. At traditional dinners, someone gives a blessing, everyone says one or two things from the past year that they're grateful for (food, shelter, Amy Gutmann) and then the entire family digs into mountains of half-congealed goodness.
The Kramer family has never done traditional well. Because we usually go with buffet, watch TV and play air hockey, I feel like my holidays have been lacking in those Kodak moments and Hallmark traditions. So today, on the heaviest travel day of the year, while you're sitting in airports, train stations and bus depots, and I'm taking my 10-minute PATCO ride back to South Jersey, I'd like to take a moment and reflect on the true meaning of going home for Thanksgiving.
For years, I had complained about my hand-me-down, stiff-as-a-corpse bed. Then, I spent my freshman year at the University of Rochester. When I went home for the first time, my bedroom seemed palatial. At Thanksgiving, as I snuggled in between my Sesame Street sheets and my Cabbage Patch comforter, I was grateful to just be out of the dorms and to sleep without the drunken screaming creeping in from the hallway. There was no throw-up outside my door, I had no bunk bed or half-depressed, half-insomniac roommate to deal with, and I didn't have to walk a block with a shower caddy to use the toilet. Home is nice.
Home is also different. If you're a freshman, this is the first time that you'll be seeing most of your friends from high school. You go back thinking everything will be the same, but that's not always the case. Going to college is like entering the Witness Protection Program. No one knows who you are, so it's easy to create an entirely new persona. That dorky kid from calc might now be the coolest, most interesting person at her new liberal arts school in Massachusetts. The jocks might have become studious. The artsy freaks are probably still artsy freaks. There's just no hope for some people.
When I went back to my high school, the hallways seemed claustrophobic. I couldn't believe that people were stuck in that building, for six hours, unable to leave without raising a hand. When the bell rang at the end of the day, I jumped.
My parents became jumpy, too. Try leaving your house at 3 a.m. to go to the grocery store for some coffee and Tastykakes. If you even get out the door, your cell phone will probably ring immediately. It's not random drunk-dialing. It's your mom, wondering where the hell you are, and why you're not in bed, and why you decided to take the car when she doesn't like you driving at night. And when you set up the motley assortment of bottles and jugs of rum and vodka and schnapps across your bedroom dresser, you'll probably be checked into a clinic.
If you're an upperclassman, going home, if you do go home, is even stranger. As you become more independent, you become more like a stranger in your own house. Half of your friends from high school are probably somewhere else in the world. Your sense of homesickness disappears as the definition of home begins to shift. Home becomes school and not wherever you're from. The ties that bind you to where you grew up begin to disintegrate.
I'm thankful for the differences between school and home, because I realize that they're good differences. When I'm at home, I appreciate school more so than when I'm lying in bed, listening to the drone of Enter Sandman and poker tournaments taking place in the apartment next to mine. When I'm at school, I appreciate my home more so than when I can't leave my house without a GPS device implanted in my teeth.
So when you're home this weekend, and you're eating half-glazed tofu fake meat, and watching Elf for the second time, and you find yourself dreaming of Penn, take a deep breath. Realize you're not Home Alone. Just click your red and blue heels three times and be thankful that there's no place like Penn.
Melody Joy Kramer is a junior English major from Cherry Hill, N.J. Perpendicular Harmony appears on Wednesdays.
