How to celebrate Thanksgiving if you’re staying on campus

Thanksgiving is a time to celebrate with your family and friends back home in numerous ways such as eating delicious food, watching football, and maybe even seeing a parade. There’s just one problem: you’re stuck at college and for some reason, you don’t have the time to come back home. What can you do? According to this website, here are some fun tips on how to celebrate Thanksgiving on campus.

Getting Together

So, you can’t get together with your family for the holidays for some reason. Bummer. Luckily, you can gather your friends on campus and do a little “Friendsgiving,” where you can gather a bunch of your friends on campus and host Thanksgiving that way! If you’re still feeling homesick, call your family on Zoom or Skype them. You can catch up with them, and maybe even play a couple of games over Zoom!

Chow Time

One of the best things about Thanksgiving is the food, from a nice delicious turkey with stuffing and cranberry sauce to a sweet pumpkin pie dolloped in whipped cream. If you want, maybe you can do some Thanksgiving shopping at your local grocery store near campus, and maybe whip up a nice dinner you can share with your friends! Or if you’re too tired to cook, head to the dining hall on campus, where they’re sure to cook some nice food! If your dining hall food is way too bland (wink, wink), maybe you can order some takeout to eat while you watch football. 

Other Events

There are multiple other fun things to do on Thanksgiving! If you like running, maybe you can jog in your local Turkey Trot; 5k races are guaranteed to burn some calories before dinner. Or maybe you can take a look at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Since you’re extra close to New York, you can hop over to the other side of the Hudson to see dancers, musicians, and balloons of iconic characters. After Thanksgiving, you can go shopping at your local mall on Black Friday. Or, in the spirit of giving, you can help out your community by volunteering at an animal shelter or a food bank!

What Not To Do

A common practice that some people do in celebrating Thanksgiving is romanticizing the history of the first Thanksgiving, where the Pilgrims and the Wampanoags got together to celebrate. When celebrating Thanksgiving, you should not do this as it ignores how the Pilgrims later murdered the Wampanoags for their land shortly after. Ignoring this history contributes to the injustices that the Wampanoag and other Native American tribes face today. Thanksgiving is a time to celebrate being grateful for each other, but it should not be a time to glorify our history and contribute to the ways Native Americans are hurt by our society. It is worth noting that November is Native American Heritage Month and the day after Thanksgiving is Native American Heritage Day. 

To conclude, there are many ways to celebrate Thanksgiving while staying on campus, and even though it may not be the fun, family get-together you would rather celebrate, it still will give you a unique experience that is guaranteed to leave you with a lot of nice memories.