thanksgiving.

We pretended a little, but all together it was a lovely Thanksgiving in Thailand.

We headed out this morning to enjoy coffee at a newly discovered, best-coffee-in-town shop. We took our bicycles, the wind was blowing, and it was actually a little chilly. I had to hold down my skirt in the wind, and I biked through a few leaves blowing to the ground. It was just a split second of fall, and I cherished it.

We’re doing all we can to convince ourselves of the holiday, since it feels like never-ending June here: we bought some fallish-looking flowers from the market; we’re watching through all the Friends Thanksgiving episodes; we had pumpkin bread for breakfast. Stephen has even let us begin listening to Christmas music in an effort to bring on the holiday spirit!

We went to join some of the Partners staff and local Karen for a Thanksgiving celebration and birthday. It was a mix of traditional Thanksgiving foods–turkey, rolls, sweet potatoes, green beans, pumpkin pie–and a few less traditional items–bruschetta, apple pie, and cheesecake. I helped to make rolls, green bean casserole, scalloped corn, and pumpkin pie. It was quite a lot to make, not only for a group of twenty-five, but to start from scratch. Green bean casserole required actually chopping green beans, mushrooms, onions, and garlic; Stephen even helped to deep-fry some crispy onions for topping. We chopped a 5 kilogram pumpkin earlier this week and used half of it for the pies today.

I loved making the scalloped corn: that was my favorite growing up, and my it’s-not-a-holiday-without-it. We had to shuck the corn and then cut off the kernels, which I loved. We used to have whole days of cutting corn off the cob when we lived on the farm. We got to move the television into the kitchen and watch more than our one-hour-per-day usual while we chopped corn all day.

The feast was such fun, though.  They asked Stephen to share a little of why we celebrate Thanksgiving, and it was fun to have him tell of how the Native Americans and settlers “shared a meal even if they couldn’t speak the same language.” We did the same today, and it was lovely. Our boss kept saying, “Sorry! No rice today!”

Stephen was a little concerned about the size of the plates.