This Thanksgiving, like many college students, I plan on recuperating all the weight I lost in the previous three months in just one meal.

"How is this possible?" you ask. It's quite simple, really. The adolescent male stomach is capable of swelling up to three times its normal size in the presence of freshly ordered pizza, and up to ten times its normal size on Thanksgiving. The portion of the food which is not directly converted into gas goes to the semi-colon for post processing, where it is transmuted into the missing body fat at better than 98% efficiency. Such is one of the many advantages of being conferred an y-chromosome at conception. (Other advantages include being able to belch the alphabet and temporarily ignore notions of common sense .)

The second major part of Thanksgiving involves spending quality time at home amongst your family. Or, as it is more colloquially known among we teenage males, "a fate worse than death."

However, if you can survive learning about strange unknown relative's podiatal problems, being nice to your siblings for a little while, and making suitable mouth noises at the dinner table to convince your parents that you're listening to what they're talking about, you shall be rewarded with a glutonous feast of savory victuals! Either that or charred turkey. It all depends on how well Dad cooks. But it will still be be better than college food.

There are many myths prevalent today about the creation of Thanksgiving. Some say it was founded by the same aliens that helped build the pyramids. Others say it stems from a secret Masonic ritual in which Turkeys were sacrificed upon a fiery pagan alter to Hewlett-Packard in the hopes of receiving free printer cartridges. Others say it had something to do with pilgrims, but it's really not worth considering the silly ones.

Wherever it came from, it was eventually formalized as a national holiday by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War: