Passé the Turkey

Don't expect the kids home for Thanksgiving. Young adults are increasingly spending the holiday with their buddies instead of their families, the Christian Science Monitor reports, due in large part to the longer distances between where Gen-Yers live and where they were raised. A 2006 poll found 8% of Americans took the turkey-with-friends route last year.

The trend also has a foothold in the 1970s, when women started attending college in much larger numbers, delaying marriage and making friendship networks "more important than they used to be." Add in high divorce rates and blended families, and you have a generation with a much looser definition of "family"…or maybe the holiday is just better with friends: Says a twenty-something, "It's like my family Thanksgiving, but fun." (More Thanksgiving stories.)