By the end of tomorrow, many of us will be going home for Thanksgiving Break.

We’ve earned three days off, right? I mean, is it just me or has everyone felt incredibly stressed for the past month? Maybe it’s the depressing weather, or maybe it’s because we’ve all been anxious about Adam Sandler’s new movie.

Whatever the reason, it’s about time we go home to spend a few days with family before we have to do it again in a month. I almost feel as if the inventors of the holidays figured, “We should probably get all this family time out of the way in one fell swoop.”

This can be a difficult, confusing time (“Did the world really need ‘Jack & Jill?’”), because while we love our families, something can feel off. While everyone says, “I’m just seeing my relatives for Thanksgiving,” there is occasionally that back-of-the-mind thought of, “Maybe it’s time to move on.”

We’re college students and we don’t live with our parents anymore. We can visit from time to time, but the feeling of “going home for the holidays” is fading. It’s not really “home” these days, is it? It’s “my parents’ place” or “grandma’s house” or “Olive Garden.”

This feeling is tough. We have to spend time with family because, well, they’re family. Depending on your relationships, you love them unconditionally or tolerate them enough, or resent the fact that you lived with these people for so long. We spend time with these people because that’s what we do and that’s what we’ve always done. But we can’t do it forever; we’ve growing and maturing and setting our own paths.

I guess the question I’m getting at is: When is it appropriate to start your own Thanksgiving Day traditions? It’s very similar to the trick-or-treating dilemma during Halloween, only with fewer costumes (although this differs from family to family). It’s not as if there is a designated year where we can say, “I want to eat tofurkey with my girlfriend this year” or “I’d prefer to spend Turkey Day with a group of close friends because they did that at Hogwarts.”

Other than the fact those kids were British and fictional, yeah, I can kind of see the point.

This isn’t a bash of family gatherings, because it’s understood that we’ll be doing that forever. We’ll always be dropping in for holidays in the future because we still love each other — we’re not robots (“I’ll be back”). Instead, it is an attempt to figure out if this eventual separation is considered “growing up” or “being selfish.” This is one of the last emancipations of our family before we become a true individual, but are we doing it because we have to? Or is it because, once we go on break, we imagine of all the other places we could be?

It all sounds so horrible, but there shouldn’t be anything negative about branching out. If you’ve ever read “The Lottery,” you recognize the merit in investigating your traditions. Adam Sandler still has a tradition of making movies, after all.

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