What it’s like spending Thanksgiving with someone else’s family

My family and I never really discussed my Thanksgiving plans. We continuously pushed it to the side, somehow assuming that we would eventually find a way to get me home.

We were wrong.

In late October, during Parents’ Weekend, my mom and dad broke the news to me that I would not be coming home during Thanksgiving. I tried to seem indifferent, but internally, I was devastated. There was going to be chicken, turkey, Honeybaked Ham, my cousin Gilbert’s famous mac and cheese, collard greens with bacon, green beans with bacon, stuffing, peach cobbler, sweet potato pie, candied yams, pound cake, chocolate cake, and more, and I was going to miss all of it. I got ready to spend the holiday in my dorm room in Donlon, eating whatever food I decided to buy as my makeshift Thanksgiving dinner.

Then, out of nowhere, a friend of mine who’s a junior at Cornell texted me asking what I was doing for Thanksgiving. When I told him that I was staying in the dorms, he said, “that’s it, you’re coming with us.” I have a close relationship with his family as I went to high school with him and his little brother, who is a freshman at Cal Poly, and we all played extensive amounts of basketball and baseball with each other. Nonetheless, on the drive down from Ithaca to their family friend’s house in Chester, New York, I was pretty nervous. I knew there would be a lot of people I didn’t know that I would have to live with for a few days in a house I was unfamiliar with, and I thought, “I could have had a relaxed, stress free Thanksgiving by myself in the dorms.”

As I looked out of the window of the backseat of the car, thinking about how productive I could have been if I stayed in Donlon all week, the driver of the car, a woman who lived in Ithaca that was also a family friend of the people I was staying with, turned around and said, “Oh, Evan, you get to meet the frog!”

“The frog?” I asked, confused.

“Yes, the frog!” she said again emphatically. “You’ll see when you get there.”

I didn’t know what the frog was. Maybe it was someone’s nickname, maybe it was a pet, maybe it was some frog that frequented the backyard. I stopped thinking about it after a few minutes and went to sleep.

I awoke in the driveway of the family friend’s house. Still very groggy from the drive, I mentally prepared myself to meet a dozen or so strangers and trying to remember all of their names.

View from the house in Chester

As I walked in and introduced myself to the horde of people, I slowly began to realize that nearly everyone in the room attended, or currently attends, Cornell. That definitely helped break the ice, as we were able to have conversations about campus life while exchanging our weirdest Cornell stories to date. In the middle of one of these stories, the owner of the house interrupted and said, “Oh, Evan, have you met the frog?” I had completely forgotten about the frog, but I was intrigued again.

Sharing stories at the house

He got up from his chair and walked over to a large glass container, which strangely resembled an office water cooler, on the ground on the left side of the living room couch. He motioned for me to come over, and once I was next to him, he pointed inside. The container was about half-full of water with the bottom covered in pebbles, and floating at the top of the water was a small, light green frog.

“This is it?” I thought to myself.

“Yep, I’ve had this frog since ’77,” the owner of the house said. “It lived with me when I was still at Cornell.”

“How’d you get it?” I asked.

“One day, a few friends and I went to a pet store and bought it pretty spontaneously. 39 years later, here it is.”

“How old do frogs usually live to be?” I said, not an expert on frogs nor their life expectancies.

“I’m not sure. Can someone look that up?”

After a few seconds of furious typing, someone said, “Well, the oldest known frog to date is only 37, so this very well may be the oldest frog on record.”

“Seriously?” the owner of the house replied, surprisingly calm. “Well, it looks like we have the oldest frog ever documented here.”

After the frog discovery, we went back to normal conversation, but I suddenly found myself participating more and more and beginning to fit in. A few minutes later, I realized all would be okay. The food would be different, the people would be different, the traditions would be different, but I was still going to have a great Thanksgiving nonetheless.

New Thanksgiving cuisine