For my friends here, American Thanksgiving is what Joey, Rachel, Ross, Chandler, Monica and Phoebe celebrated on the popular TV show Friends. When the idea came up to celebrate Thanksgiving they recalled past Friends episodes, laughed about Monica stuffing her head in a turkey and recalled the friends gathering around on Thanksgiving to share memories. They asked me if that’s what Thanksgiving is like and it made me laugh. “I guess every family is different.” The plan was set, Thanksgiving in Salzburg, and this year they would made their own memories.
It was my first Thanksgiving away from my home, but I was excited to spend it with my friends in Salzburg. My foreign friends and I had been planned this day for weeks, and we were all very excited. I feel blessed to have people here who I can not only have fun with, but who support me and care about me. Before the idea to celebrate this day together, I was actually dreading Thanksgiving. I thought it would be the first day I’d be homesick and maybe open the floodgates. But, it wasn’t that way at all. It was the beginning of my own holiday traditions and my first self-orchestrated holiday feast. For the others, it was their first Thanksgiving celebration and a way to keep their American friend’s mind off her family.
The dinner had to be prepared at my friend JP’s apartment since none of us University of Salzburg students have an oven in our residences. I promised to bring the staple American Thanksgiving foods, turkey, green bean casserole and pumpkin pie. Everyone was especially ecstatic about the pumpkin pie since they’d either never had it or heard of it before. I even got a few remarks, “You make pie out of pumpkin!” The others volunteered to bring bread, wine and make various vegetable dishes. I made sure someone volunteered to bring the stuffing as my other favorite Thanksgiving dish, candied yams, had to be forgotten this year due to the price of sweet potatoes.
After scouring the city for ingredients common to American grocery stores, I finally found pumpkin puree in an overly-priced organic market and powdered cream of mushroom soup that would have to replace the Campbell’s can. Steph, Amy and I brought our ingredients and half-prepared dishes to JP’s at about 2:00 to get started. Due to class that morning (yes, class on Thanksgiving) 2:00 was going to have to work. I poured my day-ahead prepared pumpkin pie filling into to handmade crusts and cooked them first. We prepared the turkey with butter and spices and stuck the bird in the oven about 3:00. An hour into cooking time I checked on the turkey and JP and I realized his oven was no longer at optimal temperature. It seemed as though it was kaputt!
JP, his Austrian roommate and I knocked on about 10 neighbors’ doors to ask to borrow an oven but no answer. We ended up borrowing a friend’s oven across the street and running over every hour to baste. During this glorious transformation from raw bird to cooked bird, we finished the preparing the meal, enjoyed wine, each other’s company and a few holiday movies, including my favorite, Elf.
The turkey finally reached golden brown. The dishes were hot, steaming, bubbly and ready to eat. Finally, it all came together at the late hour of 10:00 and my first Thanksgiving dinner away from home was picture perfect. For two Americans, six English, five Irish, two Austrian and one Spanish-speaking girl I’d never met, it ended up being a perfect Thanksgiving dinner. We didn’t care that it was 10:00. We skipped the official giving of thanks, the prayers and all of that. I know, however, that each person that night was thankful for the company, the meal and their first slice of pumpkin pie.
December 4, 2008 at 1:22 am |
Wish I was there for Thanksgiving it looks like you had a good time.