Thanksgiving

The multinational group of guests -- united by Olay and the willingness to try dessert made from a vegetable

     I am thankful to God for many things this year. Reflecting upon Saturday's somewhat tardy Thanksgiving celebration, however, I have to say that the internet is near the top of the list. Separated from supportive family and friends to shepherd me through the art of producing Thanksgiving dinner, not only did I Google "how to cook a turkey" and "how to make gravy" (and found websites with helpful pictures and step-by-step instructions), but I also leaned heavily on the Fahrenheit to Celsius converter and Wikipedia (the latter to figure out what red berries I had purchased at the grocery -- currants -- and if they might reliably substitute for cranberries -- worth a shot).
     I have a renewed appreciation for all the grandmas, aunts, and moms who have filled tables on the fourth Thursday in November through the years. Thanksgiving can be a lot of work. First, there is the shopping. I visited Aligro, Migros, Coop, Aldi, Denner, Jim's British Market, and Carrefour before I found all the ingredients I needed. Some things, like turkey, stuffing, and sweet potatoes, aren't available just anywhere. I have great gratitude for the British this year for supplying the first two of those three items. Other necessities, like canned pumpkin and cranberries, were nowhere to be found. It turns out that if you put enough sugar and orange pieces with currants, however, they taste pretty much like cranberries. For pumpkin pies, I cooked up a bunch of butternut squash. On the other hand, a few items, like good pie crusts, are much easier to find here than in the United States.
     Then, there is the cooking. My dear family took care of cleaning the house and the yard (and Johanna made lovely placecards for everyone). I hung out in the kitchen, accompanied by Thanksgiving tunes from Grooveshark (thanks for the internet again!), and cut, boiled, mashed, baked, stirred -- and even lifted up the skin of the turkey to rub butter and herbs all over the meat (that's what the folks at howtocookathanksgivingturkey.com recommend, and with a website address like that, they should know).

The turkey, thanks to Jim's British Market and howtocookathanksgivingturkey.com.

The table, with Johanna's fabulous placecards



The pies (and my favorite kitchen decoration -- thanks, Nancy!)

    

     At about 5:30 p.m. the guests arrived. This is very early for a dinner party in Geneva. It's pretty late for Thanksgiving dinner, though, so it seemed like a reasonable compromise for us aging Americans. We invited several of Eric's co-workers, and ended up with a comopolitan group hailing from England, Belgium, France, Greece, and Spain (where I think 5:30 is more like lunch time). One of the greatest things about guests in Europe is that they never arrive empty-handed -- so we are richer by several boxes of chocolates, bottles of wine, and an adorable mini-poinsettia (to kick off the decorating for the Olay Christmas party at our house next week . . . but I'll take a few deep breaths before I think too hard about that). Another great thing about living here is that we have increased at least tenfold the amount of Ping Pong we play (by we, I mean the rest of the family, as I can still barely return a serve). To work up an appetite (in French, they say "open" the appetite), we kicked off the festivities with a Ping Pong tournament. Unfortunately for Eric's hitherto unbroken tournament record, one of the guests turned out to be some kind of Belgian Ping Pong champion, and he soundly defeated the lot of them. (Drew and Eric did better later at Around the World, but Sebastian still proved unbeatable). We also played an ice-breaker game in which everyone took a coin and had to say what they were doing during November in the year the coin was minted. It was instrctive for Eric and me that we were the only ones able to use coins minted before 1980.
     Then came dinner. Eric had watched a You-Tube video on how to carve a turkey (that extremely helpful internet yet again), and he succeeded admirably. The guests were game to try stuffing and sweet potatoes -- strange for some -- and cranberries and pumpkin pie -- strange for most. Nick (from the U.K.) even said that while he would have ordered apple pie in a restaurant as the familiar choice, if he had to have seconds of something, it would be the pumpkin pie. For those attempting to cook their first Thanksgiving dinner, I highly recommend an international guest list. I think the food came fairly close to the mark, but the wonderful thing about our guests was that, not being familiar with the typical American Thanksgiving, they wouldn't have known if it hadn't. No one complained that the stuffing wasn't quite like their Aunt Bea's or that the apple pies didn't have the same spices as the ones Grandma used to make, or that the cranberry sauce was all wrong. That is certainly something for which to be thankful! We also learned how to say the equivalent of "help yourself" in at least four languages. One never knows when that will come in handy.
     We finished the evening with a round of charades so raucous that I was a bit afraid the neighbors might call the police, which I understand is quite common in Switzerland. Our own children, of course, were by far the loudest. Put Lucas and Johanna on opposite teams and there's a duel to the death every time. The neighbors didn't call, apparently, but if the police had come, we could have introduced them to pumpkin pie as well.
   

Some of the guests were kind enough to pose with the Alien.