“”Aww, I’m sorry,”” was what my friend Joanna said to me when I mentioned to her that I would be spending Thanksgiving weekend by myself here in San Diego instead of going back home to Sacramento. I have done so the past three years and I did it again this year.

I usually have lunch or Thanksgiving dinner at a friend’s house and then recluse myself in my cell, affectionately called “”my apartment,”” staring at porn – I mean fantasy hockey statistics – on the Internet.

This year is entirely different. My entire four-day weekend was spent by myself, up until my roommates’ return Sunday night. No lunch, no dinner. Was I lonely, like a lone coyote baying at the moon in the desert? Not at all – I thoroughly enjoyed the solitude and peace, a much needed change from my hectic life.

I can actually say the weekend was productive. I got the rest I needed, caught up on my readings and just plain relaxed.

The second response I got was, “”Don’t you miss your parents?”” Well … no, not entirely. After all, I moved down to San Diego for a reason. All in all, this is perhaps the main reason I do not celebrate Thanksgiving the “”traditional”” way: I have no one to celebrate it with.

Please, please, do not say “”aww.”” This is, in a way, of my own machinations. As mentioned earlier, I have friends from San Diego who I could join for dinner, or I could go up to the City of Angels. But I decided to stay on my own.

“”But what about the tradition of having Thanksgiving dinner with your friends and loved ones?”” you must be asking yourself. If you know me at all, you would understand that I’m not one for traditions. Thanksgiving (which I have started to refer to as Turkey Day) is a time for me to reflect on things.

I admit, during my freshman year, staying alone in the dorms got a little boring. But, as the years progressed, I began to value the time I spent with the apartment all to myself. This holiday gave me the opportunity to sit back for a couple of days and reflect on the year: the good things, the bad things and the friends I hold dear.

This year in particular, I was able to reconcile some issues and give thanks to some existential being for all the positive things and people I had the privilege of being friends with.

Well, perhaps existential being is not the correct term, seeing how I am not religious and do not believe in any god. This leads me to another holiday I do not celebrate, at least not in the traditional sense: Christmas. Yes, that’s correct, call me a heathen, call me a pagan, call me an infidel; I do not celebrate Christmas.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ll be going back home for Christmas break … sorry, I meant winter break. I’ll go back to freezing Sacramento and see my family and friends. And no, I’m not like Charlie Brown: I do not get depressed at the coming of the holidays. While I agree with him that the season has become too market-driven, so has everything else in our society.

I would find it odd and rather hypocritical if I did celebrate Christ’s day of birth. I’m not a Christian. I’m not a Catholic. I’m not an anything that celebrates Christmas. And I apologize to my Christian and Catholic friends, but I mean no disrespect; this is simply what I believe.

Actually, one can argue that Christmas has, over the centuries, become more of a pagan ritual. Instead of giving gifts in the name of Christ and his glory, many people today give gifts because of some jovial old man named Saint Nick. His chubby cheeks and red-nosed reindeer are plastered everywhere. You name it, he’s probably on it. We’ve raised an icon that sometimes seems to rival that of Christ himself. We’ve become what Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in “”Dogma”” call “”idolaters.”” Man, good thing God has calmed down over the years or there would’ve been another great flood or destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah a long time ago.

So why do I not celebrate Christmas, even though it has become less religiously driven? Again, here comes my twisted sense of celebrating tradition. To me, Christmas merely marks the end of a year and the beginning of a new one. Rather than giving gifts, or even receiving them, I prefer to devote my time and energy to expressing to others what they mean to me and to wish them best luck in the new year. I think of it as a transition period from one year to the next.

True, this will most likely change when I have a child of my own. She will probably want a Christmas tree and a new hockey stick, since children are generally naive. She’ll probably learn who Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are before she understands who this guy named Jesus Christ was. Then maybe, once she understands this, she’ll come to the same conclusions I have.