It's that time again, boys and girls. Pretty soon people will be cutting down trees, buying presents, and drinking excessive amounts of egg nog. Yep, Thanksgiving is in the air alright.

Turkey Day is a time to be with your family, enjoy the taste of non-RU food, and then realize that your family members are still all a bunch of nutjobs, and you have to get back to school as soon as humanly possible. But while you're home, you want to see your friends and tell them about all the fun you've been having since your professors decided to pile on the projects and term papers.

Sadly, RU's Thanksgiving break is far too short. Starting from whenever the hell you can leave on Tuesday and lasting until you drag your ass back to campus late at night on Nov. 30, we aren't given enough time to digest. Take me for example: I will land back home in Vermont Tuesday evening. The next morning, my family and I are driving down to Boston to be with our kin, whether they like it or not. Only to drive back to Vermont on Saturday, leaving me Saturday evening to pack and get ready for the flight back to good ol' RU.

I'm not going to be able to do what I really want to do. Sit around, hang out with friends, and eat the leftovers. OK, maybe I can score some leftovers, but the former two are most likely not going to happen. And let's face it, my stay in Boston won't be too exciting, either. I'll be passed out on the couch from all the turkey I'll have consumed. I plan on taking regular doses of turkey, to minimize consciousness.

My point is that I'm not going to be home hardly at all. I'm not going to be able to see my friends, whom I haven't seen since mid-August, before I have to get on the tin can that carts me back to the New River Valley. You probably heard that there was a vote to extend Thanksgiving break by two days back in October, that didn't pass. To the powers that be at RU, I say, you all have craniums that have a strong odor of manure.

The problem these days is that no one gets the point of Thanksgiving. They think it's about food, family, parades, and football games. They're wrong. In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln set an official date to a holiday that had been long associated with pilgrims. Lincoln declared that Thanksgiving would be celebrated on the last Thursday of Nov. to celebrate "...full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union." To celebrate the unity of America, in its most split time. Not about Indians and pilgrims.

OK, so the pilgrims started it, but it wasn't really a tradition. And let's think about this; the pilgrims got kicked out by the English. How anal do you have to be to piss off a tea-and-crumpet-consuming culture like the English? Anyway, so we have these hardasses coming over on a boat to New England, which by the way, in the winter is not a good place to land your boat full of starving white people, and they make friends with the local Indians, who bring them food. In return, the pilgrims bring them small pox and alcohol, which will later result in the deaths of more than half of the population of the continent in the following 200 years. Yay pilgrims?

So hey, enjoy break, be glad the U.S. is still united, and try not to catch any plagues. And please pass the mashed potatoes.