Thanksgiving is one of those holidays that comes with associations that are as prefixed as the turkey, stuffing, and mashed potato menu.
You are supposed to meet up with your whole entire extended family, (including that cousin who has been acting like a total bitch lately but don’t say anything, she’s family),  tell animal rights jokes while you dig into turkey, and groan and look disinterested when the elders discuss politics (some things never change.)

Of course, everything falls in a spectrum. This scenario would be on the more conventional end of the spectrum. You could also celebrate Thanksgiving the way the Berkmans do it, which entails eating seafood on the beach. A little quirkier, but its still family getting together and enjoying each others company so it still remains, at heart, a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, if not in practice, then at least in principle.

However, if these two options just sound too normal to you, you could just ditch the option of a family oriented Thanksgiving altogether and road trip to Vegas with your roommate, trading the comforts of home for the lavish lights of Circus Circus, which is what my friend, who chooses to remain anonymous, did.

So, how was Vegas on Thanksgiving? Noticeably devoid of college kids, that’s for sure. “There was nobody our age,” my friend said. However, he and his roommate didn’t let that deter them. They checked into their hotel and rested for thirty minutes before going to see a show at the Cirque de Soleil. “It was phenomenal,” my friend said. He described the characters and costumes and props of the show, absorbed by the aestheticism of the experience. Did the holiday of Thanksgiving itself factor into last Thursday night in Vegas? Indirectly, at most.

“One guy was trying to sell us nudie pictures, saying do Vegas right…turkeys and titties,” my friend said. However, The “turkey” reference was about the strongest link to the holiday that he could recall.

Let’s be honest. Vegas doesn’t “do” Thanksgiving. My friend described how the city returned to its old self on on Black Friday, with hoards of people doing post Thanksgiving shopping. Whatever sentimentality existed on Thursday became buried in the waterfall of Friday’s capitalism.

Listening to my friend’s story, I can only conclude in thinking that Thanksgiving in Vegas is an odd interlude. It’s a place where family dynamics don’t really fit and where two Berkeley kids, amongst the bright lights and the rumble of slot machines, escaped the conventions of domesticity and embarked upon a different kind of holiday break.

I don’t have larger commentary to offer, because I have been away from school for four days and I already feel my analytical skills starting to fade. (It’s time to return, I suppose.) But in a column dedicated to analyzing and criticizing the status quo, it is equally interesting to sometimes step back and look at things when they’re done, needless to say, a little bit differently.

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