Thanksgiving weekend means a lot of Ontario homes sit empty while families travel to see relatives, sometimes for just a couple of nights, sometimes for the better part of a week. It’s a small window in the grand scheme of the year, but it’s exactly the kind of predictable, visible gap that’s worth a few minutes of preparation before the car is packed.
Why this window matters
Insurance data covering 2015 to 2024 shows burglary claims for homes running elevated from July through November, a stretch that covers both the summer vacation season and Thanksgiving weekend at its tail end. The pattern lines up with a simple, unglamorous reality: homes are more vulnerable when they’re visibly unoccupied, and long weekends are one of the more predictable, calendar-driven windows when that happens on a wide scale, all at once, across an entire neighbourhood.
There’s also a social media dimension worth knowing about, one that’s become more relevant every year as more of daily life gets documented and shared in real time. A 2025 Allstate Canada survey found that around one-third of Canadians who use social media may be increasing their own risk by posting vacation plans before or during a trip, with that number climbing to 51% among Canadians aged 18 to 34, who are the most active social media users overall.
The concern here isn’t paranoia or an unreasonable fear of the internet, it’s straightforward pattern recognition: a public post announcing an empty house is information a homeowner wouldn’t otherwise be broadcasting to anyone outside their trusted circle.
A short pre-departure checklist
None of the following requires more than twenty minutes, most of it far less, and it’s worth building into the same mental checklist as packing and locking the car:
- Hold mail and deliveries, or arrange for a neighbour to collect them daily. A pile of flyers, packages, or an overflowing mailbox is one of the most visible and common signals that a home is unoccupied for an extended stretch.
- Put lights on timers rather than leaving them on continuously for the whole trip or turning everything off entirely. Varied lighting that changes over the course of an evening looks far more like a lived-in home than either extreme, and modern timers make this genuinely effortless to set up.
- Ask someone you trust to check in, even briefly, over the weekend, ideally varying the time of day they visit. Most home insurance policies also expect this kind of arrangement to be in place for extended absences, and it can matter for a claim later if something does happen.
- Hold off on posting travel plans publicly until you’re back home. Share the photos and the stories later; the trip will still have happened.
- Confirm your alarm system is armed before you leave, every time, even for short trips where it might feel unnecessary. Short trips are exactly when this step gets skipped out of habit.
- Make sure your monitoring provider has current emergency contact information in case something is flagged while you’re away and they need to reach someone quickly, whether that’s you directly or a trusted local contact.
- Double-check sliding doors and less obvious entry points, not just the front and back doors. Basement windows, garage service doors, and sliding patio doors are common weak points that get overlooked in a quick pre-trip lock-up.
Where monitoring changes the equation
A home sitting empty for a long weekend doesn’t need to feel like an open risk if someone, or something, is actually watching it consistently the whole time. AI-powered monitoring continues working exactly the same whether you’re down the hall or three provinces away visiting family, and if anything looks wrong at any point during the weekend, a real local monitoring agent reviews it immediately rather than waiting for you to notice something’s off once you’re finally back home and unpacking the car.
Peace of mind. Delivered. That’s the entire value of a monitored system on a weekend like this one: it means the house is genuinely being watched, not just locked and hoped for.
Enjoy the turkey, the family, and the long weekend. We’ve got the house.Â