Pearls of Wisdom: Over the river and down the block

Hard as it is to believe, today is the last day of class before Thanksgiving Break. Time flies when you’re having fun, doesn’t it?

In years past, the first and shorter of the holiday breaks has presented a conundrum for a number of Stanford students: join the millions of stressed-out travelers and fly home for four short days or watch as campus empties out and eat your turkey dinner at Tresidder. The typical solution — skip class for a day or three and make a week of it — prompted most professors to cancel Tuesday’s half-empty lecture and Wednesday’s two-person section in favor of starting their own cooking early. Last year, however, the University demonstrated its remarkable ability to learn from its 115-year past and gave everyone the entire week off. Now, aside from wondering whether anyone will be on campus to read this column, the question remains: what will you do with seven days of freedom?

I, for one, never experienced the “To Travel or Not to Travel” predicament. Since my sophomore year of high school, my parents have lived in one of the smaller shanties of the Faculty Ghetto. While this proximity had its downsides (i.e. the possibility of a surprise visit on a Friday night or, worse, a Saturday morning), it also had one or two perks. By my first Thanksgiving break, I was thankful to simply throw my dirty laundry in my trunk and drive home (in the car I was still allowed to have on campus).

My family is not big on tradition. The closest we’ve ever come to holiday ritual — spending Thanksgiving in Yosemite — lasted for just three years before it fell prey to a scheduling conflict. Hiking Half Dome did not hold the social cache of winning the Cranberry Classic in Henderson, Nevada, so when the illustrious tournament offered my little brother’s baseball team a bid, we swapped our Curry Village cabin for a Circus Circus double and the Ahwahnee’s traditional turkey dinner for a classic Vegas buffet.

Given this unconventional history, I hardly disrupted family time by bringing ten dorm-mates home with me my freshman year. Our eclectic table included my roommate from Pakistan, my HAA (the ancestor of the HPAC) from Kansas and a number of East Coast orphans. My parents did their part, namely telling us all how mature we seemed and providing a home-cooked meal courtesy of the kitchen at Mollie Stone’s (one of several high-end grocery stores on which my family relies for nightly nourishment). Over Mollie’s perfect sweet potatoes, my HAA enjoyed a glass of wine with my parents, but, despite the fact that some of us had been drunk for the past eight weeks, the rest of the table declined my mother’s offer. We weren’t that old yet.

The next day, my family left for Lassen Volcanic National Park in Northern California. Within an hour, my brother and I were arguing in the back seat, and my father threatened to pull the car over if we didn’t stop. Some things never change.

Alongside the home-cooked meals and the regression to your high-school self, Thanksgiving Break affords the opportunity to catch up on two other luxuries missing at Stanford: sleep and contact with the real world. Compared to the dull roar of life in a freshman dorm, the peace and quiet of our road-side motel was earth-shattering, and, in contrast to my egg-crate and extra-long twin back “home,” the lumpy mattress felt like a giant down-filled pillow.

I awoke the next day refreshed and ready to engage with the nation I’d lost touch with in the past two months. But our national Thanksgiving traditions — Hollywood’s holiday blockbusters and frantic thirty-days-til-Christmas shopping — were nowhere to be found in Chester, California, population 3000. Instead, I spent the day on a backcountry, cross-country ski trail and the evening waiting for Santa to come to small town America on a horse-drawn sleigh on wheels. This quaint setting, however, was just where I wanted to be — until my little brother got tired of trekking through powder and the only way to keep him going was to sing his then-favorite song, Jimmy Buffett’s “Why Don’t We Get Drunk and Screw,” at the top of our lungs in the midst of the snow-filled silent forest.

If the days immediately following that Thanksgiving were not traditional, though, I made up for lost time as soon as we returned. Well-rested and fully rejuvenated from three days in the middle of nowhere, I called my fellow home-for-the-holidays high school friends and wound up in the same place where we’d spent much the past four years. As far as I can tell, most high schools have a social mecca like this — a home with laid-back parental figures, a well-stocked kitchen and a decent stereo system, as well as pacified neighbors. This is the place where most Friday and Saturday nights end, if not begin. Even after high-school graduation, the instinctive migration continues, and, aside from a few minor changes in weight and facial hair, most people look and act exactly the same. The real value of these holiday reunions, however, lies in watching the romantic relationships unfold: some keep going strong, others collapse and a precious few begin — all providing much more entertainment than the latest “Grey’s Anatomy.”

But alongside all of the warm fuzzies of friends, family, food and sleep, Thanksgiving break has a serious downside: the schoolwork. The quarter has just past its tipping point, when professors reexamine the syllabus and realize just how much material they haven’t covered. As a result, this vacation often becomes the un-vacation, full of paper-writing for fuzzies, problem sets for techies, and reading for just about everyone.

If nothing else, however, the workload gives you something to be thankful for. In addition to NorCal’s version of winter, we here at Stanford also enjoy something that students at Stanford of the East (and many other semestered-institutions) do not — an actual December break, free of looming schoolwork. Don’t forget to count your blessings.

Next week, Lisa Mendelman will be thankful for sleep, food, friends and, of course, the requisite familial disagreement or two. Email her at lisame@stanford.edu.