For context, this is the view from my home.

We’ve all been there – whether this is your first or last Thanksgiving break at college, there’s always a sense of wanting to maximize your time off and make a trip home worthwhile. Luckily, Bwogger Zoe Metcalfe compiled a list of ideas of things to do when back home on vacation so you wouldn’t have to think of it yourself. 

• Marvel in the sheer number of snacks your parents have stocked the house with in preparation for your arrival: crackers and cheese? Yes please! Milk in the fridge that hasn’t clumped together from that one time you stole a couple of cups of milk from Ferris while under the assumption you would make cereal with the moldy box of Lucky charms you bought from Target during NSOP? Drink it! Vegetables? What are those but eat it!
• Refill your underwear: somehow the number of pairs of underwear you have access to has slowly been decreasing over the course of this semester? Ponder that phenomenon and restock.
• Enjoy baths?: honestly, you never really took advantage of your cramped bathtub during those high school days, but college has really filled you with the urge to gently achieve entropy in a tub of lukewarm water, so take a three hour long bath and avoid all that post-thanksgiving work.
• Walk by a library without being accosted by the smoke from huddles of cold, smoking teenagers.
• Gather the essentials you forgot: Hey! Did you forget your inhaler and have a bunch of asthma attacks? Find it! A coat? Heck yeah, you need that! The floss in your bathroom from circa 2007? Use it!
• Collect as many hugs as you possibly can: you’ve been gone awhile! Your family missed you terribly! Run between members and squeeze some love back into your life.

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• Read a book for fun: If you can squeeze in some downtime, pick up a book for fun! Reinvigorate your intellectual life with something you actually want to read instead of more Homer! Here’s my Thanksgiving book, but seriously, read anything, even that random dusty book that’s been sitting in your house for years.
• Hangout with all your hometown friends who are also probably in town: Remember your middle school best friend? Check out what they’re up to. Reconnect and reminisce, preferably over some hot chocolate, because depending on where you are (WEST COAST BABY), it might not even be New York fall cold.
• Have a momentary crisis of identity: You’re home. Isn’t this where you belong? Why should you go back to school where it’s hard and sometimes you’re lonely? Then, get over it because there’s too much life and learning to miss out on at school and make a resolution to throw yourself back in when you return.
• Take up s p a c e: you are no longer in NYC, where you’re one of 8.5 million people in a small little area. Stretch out on the couch or the floor and stare at the ceiling.
• Go outside: like NATURE outside. The concrete jungle’s green space is Central Park, but it lacks the wilderness of literally almost anywhere else. Take advantage of this new access (particularly if you have a car) and go somewhere where you can take a deep breath, without the smells of garbage and urine, and look at some trees or stuff.

and finally…

• SLEEP: sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep (sleep)