Thanksgiving on a Friday

I'll start with a funny story. Two Americans walk into Tesco to buy a turkey for Thanksgiving. Since it will be just the two of them and a friend they are looking for a smaller turkey. Going through the isles they see a bin full of frozen birds. Looks like a turkey without much doubt, so they buy it and take it home. Excited for their first Thanksgiving in Slovakia they show their family the 'bird' they bought. Only to find out it clearly states in German on the packaging that it is a duck. Too late to defrost another bird, they give the duck away and bought two chickens.

Thats how our holiday season began, with a duck. We thought about cooking it but Yemi was not going for it this year. All was not lost, however, our Thanksgiving dinner turned out great in the end. We had the other American from the team over and I made 2 chickens, stuffing, broccoli casserole, mac n cheese, and mashed potatoes and gravy. Not too bad for being an expat I would say. It was a challenge because you cannot buy anything pre-made in these stores, so EVERYTHING had to be from scratch so I had to really up my cooking game.

I got a lot of questions from people at work and other acquaintances about Thanksgiving. Where does it come from, why do we celebrate? It's funny because I did not really have all the answers. I never thought of putting into words what Thanksgiving means to Americans. I basically boiled it down to it's time to come together with family and friends for an extended weekend and reflect and give thanks for all that you have in your life. They definitely did not understand some of the food combination I tried to explain to them. Dishes like sweet potatoe casserole with marshmallows on top or pumpkin pie sounded a little to strange to them. One of the assistants, Silvia, gave me a special candle set for the table with our big dinner. She is so nice. We meet on Thursday mornings at the office early around 7:00 and I give her a english lesson and she helps me with my Slovak. It's a great trade-off, just a little early. I joked with the office that I may be the only American dentist to ever work on Thanksgiving! We all know dentists don't work holidays, or wednesdays for that matter!

Now our debate is whether or not to invest in a little holiday cheer and buy a tree and some decorations for christmas. It would definitely help put us in the holiday spirit but it's hard to justify the expense when we'll just toss it after this season. The troubles of transient life. One season here another season there, learning a lot but makes me look forward to setting up some roots someday.