It’s time for us to start looking past all the tests, papers and projects that tend to bring us down this time of year and focus on more important matters. Thanksgiving break is on the horizon!

I realize that we have one more week of school after this, but we all wish it started this week. Perhaps if we all concentrate on pretending and clicking our heels together three times while chanting “There’s no place like home,” our week-long vacation will magically arrive sooner.

For those who haven’t made frequent visits to the homefront this semester, a week may seem like a very long time. You may run out of things to do while you are gnawing on the wishbone at Grandma’s house. I have compiled a list of a few Thanksgiving break hints to keep your holiday gatherings from becoming a bigger yawn than your Economics 101 lecture.

“How’s school?” Prepare yourself. You will get asked this question by your aunts, your uncles and (if your community is a friendly one) maybe even the cashier at the grocery store. This question may also be presented to you in the form of “How do you like college?”

The asker may even think he or she is the first person clever enough to inquire about your university experience. Don’t tell them how wrong they are. Instead, make it a fun game. Tell each person who asks you about school a different answer.

Okay, this will require some creativity on your part, so you have to be up to the challenge. If your creative juices have been drained from all your class work, here’s a short story to get you started.

“How is school going?” someone will undoubtedly ask.

“Well, I changed my major. I started out in engineering, but I decided that I wasn’t meant to pass calc, I mean … be an engineer. So I decided to go into air dynamics and be a sky diver. I hear the professional sky divers who perform in shows and stuff get paid really well.”

If you are talking to someone who doesn’t know much about the sciences, tell them a major that sounds really intricate but doesn’t really exist and is terribly difficult to pronounce.

“I’m studying to do research on the prosythanemisis of the hurculaneum. There’s quite a market for that right now.”

Try and vary your answers a little. If you give one person a long, complex story, just tell the next person “Fine.” This will give you more down time to think up something doubly good. Meanwhile, this will provide conversation for the rest of the family, who will be trying to figure out which story is true.

If your relatives start edging toward your crazy cliff, you can always fall back on studying to get some time for yourself. This does not, of course, mean that you actually have to study. Don’t be ridiculous! You are on vacation — you shouldn’t have to be studying! That’s what dead week is for.

However, if you tell everyone that you are studying they will see you in a new light. Because unless you studied a lot in high school (and who did, really?) this will be a side of you that your family has never seen. A responsible, respectable, mature you. While they are all talking about how much you have grown up while at college, you can take a little nap over your English paper.

That’s another thing — sleep whenever possible while on break. Contrary to popular scientific opinion, I believe you can build up sleep. Getting the eight to nine hours (maybe even 10 for some people) that you need can only help you out during dead week and finals when you start averaging three to five hours of shut-eye.

Before the marathon napping begins, you should volunteer to help with the dishes at your Thanksgiving dinner. Suggest an all-family wrestling match.

But be sure to choose teams so that one is sufficiently weaker than the other and join the strong team. Make the losers do the dishes.

Not only is this a great way to get the dishes done, it helps work off enough of the Big Feast so you can have another piece of pie later for a snack.

The best thing to do over break is just enjoy yourself. Be thankful for home-cooked meals, the love of family and friends and not having to have a key to go to the bathroom. Most of all, be thankful that break is only a couple of weeks away.

Click, click, click.

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Joanne Roepke is a senior in journalism and mass communication from Aurora.