"I can no other answer make but thanks, and thanks, and ever thanks."--Twelfth Night 3.3, William Shakespeare

For the past 17 years, I've spent Thanksgiving with family, on holiday from school and devouring cranberries, turkey, mom's delicious au-gratin potatoes and her sweet potato dish topped with candied pecans.  But this year, I was the only one in the family missing from the long table (constructed from three smaller, slightly mismatched tables) in my grandparents' dining room as they celebrated Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, my mom's birthday, and my cousin's birthday a few days early.  While I missed all of them dearly, LAMDA ensured that all the Americans and international students would still be treated to a proper Thanksgiving!  The food making process may not have been as organized as my mom's typical strategy of making a long list of the foods and then adjacent to the names of the food is what time they need to be put into/removed from the oven.  Instead, we all posted on the Facebook event page what we wanted to contribute to our potluck dinner; we had some nommy dishes: Mac and cheese, sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top, stuffing balls, cranberry sauce from a homemade recipe, and tons more.

Upon entering Hogwarts, the large and majestic room we were allotted, we were struck by a warm and inviting environment full of four long tables with white table covers and dozens of lit candles with dimmed chandeliers overhead. Rodney, the professor who always walks around barefoot (now that it's so cold he wears socks), walked into the room and gave each table three bottles of red wine. We all went around and reminisced with our new best friends, whom we didn't even know three months ago, about our favorite Thanksgiving tales and stories. I'd been close with these people (felt their diaphragms expand in Pure Voice class, seen them roll on the ground in Movement class, and pretend to be in a glass elevator in acting class), but I felt like I understood them all so much better after hearing these little snippets of their lives back home. We laughed and ate our hearts out all night; my friend Julie made her first batch of latkes away from home, and they reminded me of my mom's.  My friend Erika made her mom's cranberry sauce from a family recipe, and that also brought back the taste of my mom's boiled cranberries. Sometimes it's hard to move on from a tradition, like having turkey at Thanksgiving dinner, or being with family back in the States, but every tradition was new at some point. So here's a toast to new traditions: may you remember the old, embrace the new, keep what works and forget the rest!