Friendsgiving Season
Students are heading home for the holidays, but before we do that, many of us indulge in a little trend called Friendsgiving!
If you’ve never heard of it, it’s basically Thanksgiving – but with your friends, instead of your family. Although in a lot of cases your friends ARE your family, some people go home and some stay, some are from the same suburbs and some are from further away. It’s not uncommon to see students walking to and fro with tupperwares, pots and pans, and other things on the nights of the weekend before Thanksgiving break. They’re all going to Friendsgivings!
Most people celebrate Friendsgiving by doing a potluck-style dinner, and everyone brings one aspect of a meal. It can be Thanksgiving-type meal: mashed potatoes, corn bread, turkey, more turkey, perhaps some green beans and so on, but it doesn’t have to be.
This year I was delighted to find myself celebrating not one big Friendsgiving but two! One of them was with my friends I made during my time in Beijing (although not all of them, given that many are at schools around the country… or still in Beijing), and the other was my friends from Rome and freshman/sophomore year, since a lot of them came to Rome or knew people from Rome. I didn’t host either of them, but was all too happy to take corn hotdish (aka corn stuff) to the first and mashed potatoes to the other. Both easy and delicious!
Not only that, but the university and clubs also like to put on Thanksgiving-style events. My sorority, Delta Phi Lambda Sorority, Inc., does our annual Unity Feast, where donating food to a food shelf nets you all you can eat from us, catered by Boston Market, which is a resturant that specializes in American comfort food. The Vegan society does Vegan Thanksgiving from a local restaurant called Chicago Diner where everything is Thanksgiving food but vegan, and so on.
(This plate is not from the Vegan Thanksgiving but from my Beijing Friendsgiving, in case you were concerned about the meat there.)
I wasn’t able to make it out to the Vegan Thanksgiving myself, but my friends both Vegan and not went and said they had a great time! Even if you don’t celebrate this holiday, Thanksgiving is a great time at Loyola because of the sudden wealth of food events that pop up, and how the usual annual giving tradition and consideration of those less fortunate than us recurs. Loyola year-round thinks about the poor and those with less oppportunity, but it’s when Chicago starts to get cold and windier that we too really buckle down on our philanthropic efforts.
Happy holidays, everyone!