By Rick Shefchik
Knight Ridder Newspapers
(KRT)
Thanksgiving - is there another occasion that sends more people scurrying longer distances for less reason?
Is it really worth spending hundreds of dollar to fly round trip to have a turkey dinner with your family, when, in all likelihood, you're going to be seeing them again a month later, and any restaurant you could go to instead would charge you about $9.75 for the same meal?
As we all know, there is one institution in America that is largely responsible for this frenzy of weekend air travel just to eat the stuffing out of a formerly frozen bird:
College.
That's right, if it weren't for college, most people would stay where they were on Thanksgiving. But the calendar makers cleverly positioned Thanksgiving during the month when homesickness becomes most acute for kids who went away to college - and missing your kid becomes most acute for the parents who sent them there.
If it weren't for college, our work force wouldn't be educated enough to hold down the high-paying jobs that allow so many people to plan their shopping year around the Friday after Thanksgiving.
If it weren't for college, kids wouldn't get degrees that qualified them for irresistible jobs in places far from their hometowns, necessitating holiday travel to reunite with loved ones, even though all they end up doing together is watching the giant Underdog balloon go haywire at Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade or watching some overpaid NFL wide receiver stuff himself with John Madden's turkey legs after whipping the Dallas Cowboys.
And speaking of college, if it weren't for college football on TV, the entire four days of Thanksgiving would be spent putting together jigsaw puzzles and having long family talks, which is one of the reasons people used to move away from home in the first place. As it is, we can all get together from Thursday through Sunday and say nothing more threatening to each other than, "You know, that coach is making $2 million a year, so why doesn't he know when the blitz is coming?"
You'd think we could all wait one more month until Christmas vacation for this, but no - the highways and airports are going to be jammed, as usual, with parents and kids who just have to get together, now.
It wasn't always this way. When I was a freshman in college, far away from home, I wanted to go home for Thanksgiving, too, but it seemed absurdly extravagant. Instead, a friend invited me to his home a couple of hours away to spend Thanksgiving with his family. They were great people and treated me like I was one of them, but as I recall we returned to campus a day or so early because, at 18, my friend could tolerate only about 24 hours of family togetherness.
The next year, I stayed on campus and organized a turkey dinner for about a dozen fellow waifs who lived too far away to go home. That weekend, I learned that cooking a turkey is about the easiest thing you can do in a kitchen besides make toast.
Things have changed. We are a more mobile society, and my wife is taking advantage of that mobility to fly to our daughter's college to spend Thanksgiving with her. I'm doing the sensible thing, saving money and staying home with our son.
But I wish I were going, too.
© 2003, Saint Paul Pioneer Press (St. Paul, Minn.).
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
