An ex-patriate Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a hassle at the best of times. There's the freaking turkey, which involves lots of plucking, rinsing, gagging, and yanking of various organs out of various orifices. There's the stuffing, which involves a huge inside-or-outside-the-turkey debate, and then there's the question of pecan or pumpkin pie, who is bringing the yams, and how in God's name you're going to deal with the fact that your crazy uncle is bound to bring up either politics or religion at the table, and that your sister will probably go for his throat.

However, if you subtract the crazy uncle and add in problems like how to find and afford a turkey in the most expensive city in Ireland, whether to beg your mother to send canned pumpkin from home or just suck it up and get a fresh pumpkin, and where to get French fried onions, you'll get an idea of just how insane Thanksgiving abroad can be.

When we all started planning for our Irish Thanksgiving, Jillian and I knew all of this. We figured it would a nice way to introduce Thanksgiving to our non-American friends, and a good way to assuage the homesickness that would be brought on by spending this quintessentially Yank holiday in a country that hadn't heard of it. Lists were made, dishes were assigned, and guests were invited. We were ready to throw ourselves a Thanksgiving extravaganza.

Three weeks, five essay-related breakdowns and more than a few turkey-related arguments later, Jillian turned to me and said something along the lines of, "Screw it. Let's cancel Thanksgiving."

Of course, we didn't seriously cancel it. No matter how tired or frustrated we were, the fact was, it was still Thanksgiving, and we couldn't not celebrate it. Finally, after much thought and a power trip to the crepe place down the street for some brain food, Jillian, A and I came up with the best possible way to celebrate Thanksgiving abroad -- without ending up flipping our collective shit on our guests.

Thursday night, we found ourselves seated around a table in front of a fireplace in a nice bar, Christmas decorations all around and wine on the table. The three of us were joined by our law-student flatmate, A’s Irish flatmate, one of our Irish friends from our program, and two of the guys who live across the hall from us (one of whom was Canadian and kind of apathetic about the whole thing, and the other with whom we had had several heated turkey discussions in the preceding week).

“Here, will you tell us the Thanksgiving story now?” said A as the food arrived. I had promised her the kid-friendly version of the tale weeks ago, and began it now as everyone dug in.

“A long time ago, roughly in the sixteen hundreds, a group of people called the Pilgrims, motivated by a desire to worship freely and get away from the British, sailed to America on a big-ass ship called the Mayflower. The journey was long and hard…”

I continued the story, making sure to mention Squanto the Friendly Indian (whoops, Native American) who taught the Pilgrims to plant corn. “And that’s the story of the first Thanksgiving,” I finished triumphantly, practically expecting a round of applause.

Everyone stared at me like I had grown three heads.

“Here,” A said after a few seconds. “I thought Columbus was there.”

“Right, the Spanish came and settled it first,” added her roommate.

“Columbus wasn’t Spanish,” someone else said, which was followed by a comment about Vikings and quickly the whole table dissolved into one loud discussion over who, exactly, founded America and when.

“OKAY, OKAY, OKAY,” shouted Jillian a few minutes later. “Can I tell you all the real story now?”

This quieted everyone down, as they turned to Jillian to settle the score. She pulled out a few post-its and began to read.

“First, instead of one Thanksgiving, there used to be a lot of different celebrations of all the major massacres that the settlers inflicted on the Indians. Lincoln was the first one to proclaim one national day of Thanksgiving, so up until the 1860s Americans celebrated several Indian massacres during different times of the year.”

“Massacres?” A muttered.

“There was lots of scalping and beheading and the women and children were raped and thrown into slavery. After one such massacre, the settlers played soccer with heads of defeated Native Americans. Oh,” she added, “and Pocahontas was fat.”

There was a stunned silence as the non-Americans at the table tried to process this information. The Pilgrims weren’t so nice to the Indians? Pocahantas was FAT? What is this freaking holiday? I could see them wondering.

Finally, A broke the ice. “I knew there had to be rape and pillage,” she said, grabbing the wine bottle out of the bucket in the middle of the table and waving it around. “Can I top anyone up?”

The rest of the evening, needless to say, is a bit of a blur. I remember a text message to Jillian saying, “Abt to bombscare must leave”, more than a few drinks at The Ginger Man (the pub down the street) where we toasted America and bombscaring Thanksgiving, and a long conversation about my chest that lasted long after the bartenders had kicked everyone else out but us and a woman who looked like she had been bombscaring for about 100 years.

Then there was the peanut butter and jelly party back at my apartment where somehow I ended up with peanut butter everywhere, and collapsing into bed only to wake up the next morning and wonder, “Crap, did I really tell the story about how I was flat-chested until college?” Which, in fact, I had.

Turkey, pillage and bombscaring notwithstanding, I’d have say that my second Irish Thanksgiving was a major success. :)