For Cornell students, Thanksgiving is more than just an opportunity to spend time with family, eat a home-cooked meal or reflect on the things in our lives for which we are most grateful. It’s also a much-anticipated — though teasingly-brief — escape from the increasingly depressing atmosphere of pre-finals Cornell to the kind of stress-free relaxation that can only result from free laundry and vacuumed floors. Right about now, many Cornellians are starting to slip into that self-pitying state when 60-degree weather is long-gone and spring break seems so far away it might as well be at the vet school.

You’ve been indoors long enough that you start to wonder if you will ever see your gorge-tanned, fit self again instead of your current Pale, Heavy, Overweight, Ugly and Lazy self (acronym: PHOUL, as in “Wow, I’m looking pretty PHOUL today”). If you’re in a relationship, your looming finals schedule is putting an inevitable damper on any romantic images you may have had about being with your equally bogged-down significant other before parting for the eternity that is winter break. And if you’re single, the end of the semester is quickly approaching and the hands of time seem to be ticking away on whatever’s left of your opportunities to enjoy the perks of your singledom. As you mumble under your breath about how your cell phone hand feels like it’s going to freeze off as you walk to the libe, it’s easy to forget about the opportunities for non-academic fun at Cornell to be thankful for.

So, despite the fact that most of you have probably already embarked on your journeys home, and the readership of this column will probably be limited to those who have prelims this week and my mom, I’ve decided that those of you who are stuck here are probably those people who are feeling the least grateful for the fun Cornell has offered us over the years. We’ve got plenty to be thankful for, and no matter how distant fun at Cornell may currently seem, it’s important to appreciate the fact that you’ve got memories to look back on.

When we first got to Cornell, frat parties seemed like the greatest thing since God invented Facebook. With nothing more than a Cornell I.D., you could attend a huge party complete with the Billboard’s Top 100, free-flowing alcohol and — the clincher —no sleeping parents upstairs who would die if they knew their high school child was downstairs drinking alcohol stolen from their liquor cabinet. Having watched all of National Lampoon’s movies and heard your parents’ stories of “the good ‘ol days,” it seemed to your newly matriculated self that frat parties epitomized college fun and that nothing could ever beat drinking flat beer from plastic cups among sweaty college kids too drunk to realize that they can’t actually dance. And on top of it all, you can dance or hook up with people you barely even know and you’ve got no real obligation to them. Oh joy! But eventually your throat starts to hurt from yelling over speakers blasting old Journey songs, you start to build up a tolerance to alcohol and one cup full just doesn’t do it for you and you realize that what your drinking actually tastes a lot like pee.

And then you discovered fraternal functions, such as formals, date nights and wine tours. These, you decided, were way more fun than plain old frat parties. You get to really meet people and you can actually hear the difference between someone telling you their name is “Nikki” and “Mickey” (sorry, personal pet peeve). Plus, these are dated functions, which means that you get one-on-one time with someone who gave you a personal invite as opposed to just texting you a chain invite about their frat’s big party or meeting you on the dance floor wearing beer-goggles and a soaking wet t-shirt.

Then you “turned 21” and started going to Collegetown bars full of all different kinds of people, rather than just one group of plaid short-wearing fratheads. Here, you can meet Greeks and non-Greeks alike. You can talk or you can dance and you can even drink cocktails other than Jungle Juice. There’s a wider variety of drinks, a wider variety of people and you look back on your nights of random frat-hopping and wonder how you ever enjoyed yourself.

But this question shouldn’t be one that difficult to answer. When you are a little kid, it’s amazing what can keep you occupied. Dolls for example. Bubbles. Slinkies. The box that the slinky came in. You give a kid a box and they’re occupied for a good three hours. Just as certain candies become too sweet with age, certain activities which once seemed riveting can start to feel … unfulfilling.

It might seem sad, at first, that you don’t get the same enjoyment you once did from frat parties full of strangers. But, instead, we should be thankful for all those times we had fun, regardless of how silly it may seem now. We should be grateful that Cornell has given us so many opportunities to enjoy ourselves, and that all new kinds of opportunities keep coming. Once you realize that it isn’t really about where you are, but who you’re with that makes the difference to how much fun you have, you can appreciate that there will always be opportunities for you to have a good time. So as you sit in the library silently cursing Cornell for putting you through the hell that is finals week, try to keep the Thanksgiving spirit in mind, and be grateful that, the second you’ve finished that last exam, you’ve got a whole university filled of students to help you celebrate.

Nikki Nussbaum is a junior in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. She can be contacted at nnussbaum@cornellsun.com. Cornell Unzipped appears alternate Mondays.