Don't Forget to Appreciate Thanksgiving This Year

While Thanksgiving may be a reminder of the beginning of the end of the native people of North America, I still really enjoy Thanksgiving. I like to think of it as an example of a time when food brought people together, and has brought people together for a meal annually ever since.

The first Thanksgiving may have been crude, a gathering 53 pilgrims about 90 native peoples according to the Pilgrim Hall Museum. They were celebrating the harvest, as was customer in England, which was made possible by the help of Squanto. Little did they know, people in the future would be eating a substance call tofurkey and slicing gelatinized cranberry to eat it with while gathering with their cousins andtheir great aunt Gurty, stuffing themselves to the gills all the while.

Some Thanksgiving meals may be less than satisfactory depending on the family, but almost ever family has adopted the tradition of thinking about what they’re thankful for. Family, friends, health, life in general, we remember what is important as our mood drops with the mercury. We gather with our loved ones, sometimes knowing that this may be the last time we are all together. This is what I love most about Thanksgiving.

My second favorite thing though, of course, is the cooking! Last year I chose to not make the six hour journey home from college and instead spent Thanksgiving with my old roommate from freshman year who I went to high school with. Ever since I met her parents, I knew they pressured her too much about her weight and made her feel guilty for eating. To me this was insane; she was very tall, but at a perfectly healthy weight with a normal appetite for her size.

We decided to make our own complete thanksgiving dinner, entirely from scratch and from carefully selected recipes. One of those being my absolute favorite recipe from my great grandmother, a former restaurant chef and all around amazing person, her delicious brown sugar pan rolls known as Granny Rolls. We had a full turkey, green beans, granny rolls, fresh cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, brown gravy, a pumpkin pie to top it off, and a bit of rum to keep us warm since one of my roommates had used the oven and left something that had bubbled over in the bottom of the oven, which burned, filling my entire apartment with smoke. We had to leave the windows open the whole time we were cooking, letting in the very chilly Arcata air, and setting off the smoke detector several times.

It was definitely one of the most memorable Thanksgivings I’ve ever had. Aside from the green beans, I was able to make everything by myself, and share my cooking with someone who was truly grateful to be eating it. That year I was grateful to be giving someone the gift of a guilt free thoroughly enjoyed meal, sharing an amazing family recipe with a friend, and the turkey wasn’t even dry either.

This summer I moved back to my hometown, living with my boyfriend. Whether the two of us have Thanksgiving dinner alone at our house, dinner with my family, or his, I know I have a lot to be thankful for and I hope I can share it with everyone.

So this year, when you gather around the table, whether you have a full feast before you or have whatever you can scrape together, just remember to enjoy your time with your family and remember to share the food you love with people that matter to you the most.

-Melissa Kilmer

YouTube, It's Better Than T.V.

YouTube, it’s better than T.V.

While I, being technologically uninterested, haven’t really checked out YouTube, many fellow college students such as myself have. Not surprisingly, the love it.

With the quality of television programs decreasing in recent, the price of cable television and associated equipment has become costly, and the rise of internet usage among young people YouTube has become the new T.V. In 2006 teenagers on average spent 26 hours a month on the net according to Pew research.

Those hours were spent watching clips of their favorite shows as a kid, music videos, home videos of people getting hurting, being pranked, etc, artistic videos, like my boyfriend’s favorite YouTube video of a puppet rendition of the Dandy Warhols’ song ‘We Used To Be Friends’ http://youtube.com/watch?v=NgrRRNwj7mU .

Among college students its common to get these tasty little links forwarded to your e-mail box or sent in an instant message because people love the content so much they want to spread it to other people. And that’s where YouTube has T.V. beat. If it’s actually good, watchers advertise it themselves to get viewership. There are no cheesy plots or lame product plugs. You get what you want, and videos produced by independent artists get what they want: an actual audience.

So this brings about a mini revolution. People with actual talent can have their work viewed without getting censored by corporate media. It’s a new frontier, having the viewer decide what gets the most viewing; the people decide what they want to see. The best part, no advertising in the clips you view. No drilling of product names into your head, no ads with stick thin models prancing around, no feeling pressured or inadequate or missing out if you don’t have the latest gadget or product. It’s given people back the control and freedom to connect with the world on their terms.

Do you have to wait until 8:00 to watch something that will crack you up after a long day of drudgery? Nope. Do you have to sit through minutes of commercials? Nope. Can you watch YouTube comfortably on our comfy couch? Unless you have a laptop, being comfortable like you would while watching television is out of the question. That’s really the only drawback to YouTube. It is better content wise, but it has the drawback of being viewable only at your computer.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing though. With short clips and no commercials, you can spend less time watching YouTube clips than the average person would watching television. You’ll get more content, and more of what you actually want in an hour than you would be watching a standard hour long television program. Add the fact that your computer chair isn’t the comfiest seat in the house and you’ll be sure to not lounge around all day watching YouTube clips like you would with T.V.

YouTube isn’t limited to just the younger generation though, adults are catching on too. A few weekends ago I went to visit my parents, who are in their 50’s, and my dad insisted on showing a YouTube clip of a guy doing donuts in his BMW in Europe who almost gets hit by a bus. He got this from a co-worker while at work. Forget the office romance policy, hello no-YouTube-ing policy. In an office setting this could get tricky, but, that’s for bosses to decide, right?
So there you have it, the good, the good, the good, and the mildly uncomfortable of YouTube. As long as the site stays free and the government doesn’t censor content, especially for the sake of political use of YouTube, I think over all it’s a good step in the right direction of producing content that the public actually wants to watch