The last Thursday of November is one of my favorite days of the year. I have fond childhood memories of traveling to visit or hosting aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents, watching the parade while enjoying cinnamon rolls, chilly autumnal walks after dinner, sometimes a trip to the movies if Mom was working a nursing shift, and of course, at the center of it all: the Thanksgiving table.
A couple of my favorite memories from Thanksgiving that I think emulate the meaning of the day:
One year we were hosting lots of people, including a neighbor’s relation we had never met before. As we were getting cooking and setting the table, a woman walks in the front door with a dish, walks all the way into the kitchen and sets down the dish on the counter, and my family greets and welcomes her, thinking she is the invited relation arrived a bit early. She was very lovely, but confusingly, she didn’t seem to know our neighbor. Turns out, she had walked into the wrong house. We tried to convince her that because she set the dish down, it was legally ours by the laws of Thanksgiving, but she didn’t buy it and left to find her intended dinner 🙂 Fortunately for her, and for anyone needing a table to gather round, in our house, the door is open and strangers are welcomed as old friends.
Another year we all went to stay with our cousins in Oregon. They had just finished remodeling their kitchen, just in time for the big meal. However, not all the furniture was ready – the table and chairs were still in their flat pack IKEA boxes. So that year, our preparation included not only cooking the food and setting the table, but assembling our own chairs so we had something to actually sit on. In a modern day version of barn-raising from Little House in the Big Woods, we were literally building a home together and celebrated with a feast.
It’s one of the things you don’t really think about until you move away from the US: the whole world does not celebrate Thanksgiving. The world does not stop for 2 days for everyone to travel across the country to eat a meal. You don’t automatically get a few days off work. So while I know it is ultimately just a holiday full of traditions unlinked to anything truly meaningful (not like, you know, the miraculous incarnation of God or the earth-shaking resurrection), Thanksgiving has come to be a special day for me as an American living in the UK.
I’ve had the privilege of hosting 5 Thanksgiving dinners in my home in Oxford. I take the day off work and spend pretty much all of it cooking while watching something like Sound of Music, then welcoming as many friends as fit around my table to stuff ourselves silly. Over the years, it has remained special to me because I’ve worked to make it so, and I’ve found the meaning of it has changed and shifted, and in some ways deepened. Here’s some thoughts on how:
Thanksgiving invites homecoming. For many college students who’ve gone out of state, it’s the first time in the year we brave the stressful holiday travel and return home in the semester, eager to rest before finals and to pet our dogs and cats. Now that Colorado is a bit further away and it’s not very realistic for me to travel all that way, Thanksgiving reminds me how thankful I am that Oxford has become a home. God has called me here, and He’s given me a passion for opening my home to others. I’ve written and spoken previously on hospitality and home, so I’ll just say here that I love that Thanksgiving fills me with that longing, not for a romanticized, nostalgic version of my childhood home I can never really return to, but a longing for our true home. Wherever I am, however much I feel like I belong, whatever comfort I can take from the familiar, I know where my true home is.
Thanksgiving brings family together. I know family isn’t easy for everyone and sometimes the holidays are just something to grin and bear, but I am blessed to have a wonderful family. Despite our differences and tiffs over the years, we really love each other and love being around each other. Though when I’m in the UK family is far away geographically, when I cook the recipes that I used to make with my family, knowing that they are making them an ocean and a continent away, I feel close to them in ways I can’t explain. I am also thankful that I have friends who have become family to me. I am known and loved here.
Thanksgiving centers around the table. As the youngest sibling, setting the table somehow always fell to me. Though I might have complained as a child about it (sorry Mom), I’ve come to appreciate the joy of setting a table in the spirit of hospitality. We eat off the fancy plates and use the dining room silverware on Thanksgiving, with chargers and table runners and water goblets and bread plates and everything, because sometimes days are special enough for it. Here at my little flat in East Oxford, I might not have any matching glasses or enough dessert plates and bowls (definitely ate my pumpkin pie out of a mug this year), but I have a table where we can gather and be merry. Top tip: candlesticks are relatively cheap and go a long way towards making a table feel very fancy.
Thanksgiving can’t be Thanksgiving without food, and lots of it! Isn’t it amazing that God created us with the basic need of nourishment, yet He also created it to taste SO good, with so much variety and flavors?! There is something so powerful about eating together, and in turning a meal into a feast. I may not have the time, money, or oven space to recreate every single dish we’d normally have, but I’ve adapted and created something new each year, which is just as fun. Don’t worry, I still have leftover pumpkin pie for breakfast the next day, seasoned with Trader Joe’s Pumpkin Pie Seasoning.
No, Thanksgiving is not what it used to be, and it never will be the same in the UK. I think every year I feel at least a little melancholy about what and who is missing, but it’s a melancholy that’s part of the recipe to create something new.
I’ll end with answering question I get asked a lot in the UK: What do you actually eat on Thanksgiving?
A meal traditionally includes:
- Full turkey
- Mashed potatoes
- Vegetable side (my favorites are maple bacon brussel sprouts, honey sage carrots, lemon garlic asparagus, and rosemary sweet potatoes)
- Gravy
- Cranberry sauce
- Stuffing
- Pumpkin pie and whipped cream for dessert (no joke, the best pumpkin pie in the world is actually from Costco)
- To drink, Martinelli’s sparkling apple (like a fancier US version of Schloer)
You might also have:
- Winter salad
- Bread rolls or cornbread muffins
- Mac and cheese or other pasta salad
- Other pies like apple or chocolate cream
Some weirder American dishes:
- Green bean casserole (topped with French’s Crispy Fried Onions, seconds please!)
- Cheese ball (great appetizer, way too easy to fill up on before the main course)
- Sweet potatoes topped with marshmallows (no thanks)
- Ambrosia salad (even worse than the sweet potatoes)
- and the most American of them all: the Turducken. A chicken, inside of a duck, inside of a turkey. This is the freedom our forefathers fought for. Whenever you take a bite, an eagle caws in the distance.
So thank you to those who help me celebrate Thanksgiving in the UK, for sharing my home and gathering around my table. Thank you to my family for cheering me on and loving me, and for saving me that piece of Costco pumpkin pie I know you put in the freezer for me.
Hopeful Wanderer 