Last weekend, some of my friends and I celebrated Friendsgiving—basically Thanksgiving minus family. We decided to have a potluck dinner, mainly because being broke college students meant that one person couldn’t afford make every meal. Coming from the UK where this isn’t celebrated, I didn’t know much about Thanksgiving, let alone Friendsgiving, but I found it to be very similar to Christmas Day/Boxing Day without all the presents.
We decorated the apartment with fairy lights, candles, had all of the notorious Friends Thanksgiving episodes playing in the background, along with a massive spread of food (again, being from the UK, portion sizes are not as big there) and music—it had all the cozy vibes you could imagine. We tried to keep the meal as close to a traditional Thanksgiving meal as possible but switched out pumpkin pie for one of my friend’s homemade chocolate pie, which in my opinion, was way more tasty than a pumpkin pie.
Having good food with your good friends overall created a really nice vibe, and I think that it’s important to take the time to show your appreciation by doing things like this. Being away from home during this time of year can get quite lonely wherever you are, so having people close to you and being able to get together for the holidays can help with that. It’s also so much fun to binge-eat delicious food, have a laugh and hang out! I personally really enjoyed the whole concept of Friendsgiving and definitely told people back home about it (they were mainly jealous of all the food Snapchats I sent them!).