Penny: So, what are you guys doing?

Howard: Celebrating Columbus Day.

Leonard: We’re watching Goonies, Gremlins and Young Sherlock Holmes. They were all written by Chris Columbus.

Penny: Okay. What do you watch on Thanksgiving?

Sheldon: The parade.

- The Big Bang Theory, Season 3 Episode 4, "The Pirate Solution"

Every year, to celebrate Thanksgiving, my parents have had the whole family and a bunch of relatives and friends over for socializing, turkey, and stuff(ing). It's always great to see family, play cards with my grandparents, share a meal and give thanks. However, this coming Thanksgiving weekend my parents will be out of town, so I'm currently without a plan this Thanksgiving. What I can't decide is if I want to do something for Thanksgiving and, if so, what I want to do.

When I say that I would "do nothing" for Thanksgiving, that would be that I'm doing nothing socially. I like long weekends such as this because I can spend hours and hours on my personal hobbies such as inReview.net. These websites are my way of playing with new technologies and my hobbies, but I struggle with doing them day-to-day because I find it works better if I have open-ended time of at least a couple hours to work hard on it, otherwise you spend an hour or two getting up to speed and figuring out what needs work and then you're done. Also, I get a little tired of doing web architecture/programming after 8 hours of doing it for work and so it's hard to spend my weeknights doing it. Spending Thanksgiving working on programming stuff may be a bit anti-social, but it's just this year and at least it's semi-productive.

Since friends have found out that I have no plans for Thanksgiving and a number of them have invited me to their family celebration. However, I'm not sure I'll be that comfortable with that either. I've always gone to my family's celebration, and although I do know a number of these families a bunch, it seems like it could be pretty awkward to be the non-family member at a family tradition. I'm probably over-thinking this, but I guess I'm not too sure if I'm that comfortable with it.

The other problem with attending Thanksgiving celebrations is that I think it's going to be boring. One of my friends invited me to his family's event, but after talking for a bit he said that the main event is drinking beer and watching football most of the day. Although I enjoy some good beer and the engaging commercials that play during football (and not during the shows I like), I get REALLY BORED watching football in no time flat. Although a bit of football is watched at my parents' house on Thanksgiving, I spend most of the time playing cards or chatting with aunts, uncles and cousins upstairs while the TV is on downstairs. So I'm not even sure if I want to go to Thanksgiving.

So what do you think? Should I go find some turkey at a friend's house? Just keep working on the hobbies and just make myself a nice dinner? Am I anti-social? Am I not crazy? Am I asking too many questions?