I wish we had Thanksgiving. I could do with another holiday before Christmas...

You can have it if you want. Make a turkey and a sweet potato casserole. Pumpkin pie for dessert. Invite all the family over. Make the ones who don't live nearby feel guilty if they don't want to come. Everyone should eat too much. Watch sports on TV. And you all have to have a big fight at least once during the day. It's easy.

I'll still have to go to work though. :( The day(s) off was/were the main appeal.

Don't forget green bean casserole. If you have an aunt who has a "special dish" that everyone hates but is too polite to mention it, invite her along. (It will probably be the green bean casserole.) All the kids must sit at a separate table. Preferably a folding table with a dodgy leg. If you're really lucky, the table will collapse. That will get the fight out of the way. Try to arrange for the turkey to be done 15 minutes before "the game" ends. Preferably while the score is tied or "our team" is staging a furious comeback. That will take care of the fight if you don't feel like cleaning up after a collapsed table.

Oh my gosh. That green bean casserole looks horrible. I also don't like sweet potatoes or pumpkin... and don't understand American football so I probably wouldn't do so well with Thanksgiving!! The rest of it sounds like Christmas apart from the presents though! And in the interests of trying to be vaguely OT: that Hugh's great, huh?

If you have grown children who do not go home for Thanksgiving make plans to show up at their house the Friday after for an indeterminate amount of time. Bring your aged dog with you and make it clear that it's not a casual visit but a working visit and that yr grown child and her recently returned from tour boyfriend should be prepared to do heavy lifting and manual labor throughout the duration of yr visit. Plan your visit in such a way that it interferes with yr grown child's plan to indoctrinate her boyfriend into the glories of House fandom by spending the weekend watching DVDs. (see? on topic) Thanksgiving's awesome. Every country should totally adopt the tradition.

It probably depends on where they are in the schedule. I wouldn't think they would start a new episode on Monday if they were going to take Thursday & Friday off. (But he was probably counting Thursday - Sunday as a 4 day weekend.)

They get four days off for Thanksgiving, regardless of where they in any particular episode - beginning, middle or end. They will shoot up until Thursday, with maybe Wednesday being a light day for some. HL doesn't necessarily go home every Thanksgiving. He stayed here two years ago. In television, four days off is always welcome though. :)

The kids probably didn't as they would've had school...

I don't understand it very well, either, and yet I'll be spending the day at a football game. It's actually not that hard a concept -- each team getting four tries to get the ball 10 yards, with the goal of getting it in the end zone. All the while, the sober fans try desperately to dodge the drunk ones, and all the female fans sigh wistfully as they watch Matthew McConaughey watch the game with his infant son. I love this. Occasionally during the work day (and by occasionally, I mean "9 of the 10 hours I'm there) I play on flickr and places like that and am constantly coming across amateur paparazzos who have found themselves sitting near celebs at sporting events and think they're being all cool with the secret snapping. They're really not. Except, apparently, anything involving Stephen and Hugh because those pics are *never* clear. I'm not even entirely sure that they're them. The back of Jeremy Piven's head at a Lakers game? Crystal clear. Stephen Fry on the red carpet at a movie premiere? Random, out of focus, black blob that might be Stephen or might be a mailbox.