Next week, millions of us will travel to the homes we grew up in — all in the name of holiday cheer. We will partake in fantastic meals. Play games. Sit in front of the fire. Watch lots of football. See old friends.

At least that’s what the movies make you think will happen.

In real life, we get stuck in massive holiday traffic. The meal makes us so full we can’t move. And our old friends? Well, with many of them, there’s a reason they’re called “old” friends.

But if the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome, then the annual Thanksgiving ritual of going over the river and through the woods to Grandmother’s house feels exactly like insanity.

Perhaps the reason the family in the song was so excited to get to Grandmother’s house was because they had a cozy bed to sink into upon arrival. Unfortunately, my childhood home doesn’t have any beds left that fit a grown-up person. My mother has turned every room into her version of a “crafts” room, which means there are no actual beds allowed, only pull-out couches or the twin-sized trundle bed in my brother’s old room that’s about 50 years old.

She does go to every length to make us more comfortable, including buying all sorts of plushy mattress covers. But I guess I’m like the princess with that pea: I can feel every little spring in my back. She even got a specially made Styrofoam block that prevents you from falling into the abyss of the trundle bed. And I’m certain the engineering geniuses that designed the original trundle bed did not anticipate my very large husband sleeping on one, because inevitably it just breaks down entirely in the middle of the night.

My husband tries everything he can to get out of my mother’s house as quickly as possible — not because he doesn’t like his mother-in-law but because he’s sleeping on a torture device.

So basically I don’t sleep when I visit Mom. Which is fine because then I can return to my childhood ritual of staying up all night watching television and raiding her freezer for baked goods.

I get so nostalgic for the cookies my mom made when I was a kid. And I know the cookies I will find in the freezer are the same ones that I ate when I was kid. No, I mean they are the exact same batch she made when I was a kid. Mom insists they are new, but from the amount of ice that’s accumulated on them, how can she tell that they’re even cookies, let alone how old they are?

Yet that doesn’t matter to me when I’m home in my childhood manse. I find myself binging because I cross the threshold into the Twilight Zone of my youth. Years of therapy only makes me aware of what I’m doing; it doesn’t actually stop me from doing it.

And yet, despite the bad mattress, the too hot water from the ancient water heater, and the flashbacks to my adolescence angst, I wouldn’t give up the chance to return home. It reconnects me to my past and the love I knew in that house. While we’ve all changed and grown older and Dad is no longer with us, that feeling stays the same.

I’m grateful that this Thanksgiving, the morning after our long drive, my mom will be sitting in her robe, drinking her coffee and waiting to talk. And the first question she’ll ask will be, “How’d you sleep?” I just won’t have the heart to tell her the truth.