Over the years I have learned to appreciate what Thanksgiving means to families in the U.S. (aside from all the accompanying stresses of course). For my own American family, it was always a congregation of generations in my in-laws' house, children running around, my niece putting black olives on her fingers, women preparing food in the kitchen, men watching football and talking politics, until finally, everyone sat around the long table, said thanks and enjoyed a wonderfully delicious meal.
Living abroad brings many different challenges, which we try to soften by keeping family traditions alive, especially during holidays. With food being such an essential part of these celebrations, it can become a major task to recreate holiday meals outside of one's home country. My husband missed the above described celebration with his family when he was an exchange student in Germany. As an attempt to accommodate the foreign students, his university prepared a Thanksgiving lunch for the few Americans that came to recreate their holiday in the cafeteria. By no means the perfect substitute, but a taste of home as much as a gesture by the host country.
Later I would find out how much it means to preserve holiday traditions, and how far someone literally would go, in order to bring Thanksgiving dinner to a snowed in American expat community in Ukraine. It was a cold winter in 1997, Kiev was covered in snow and permanent ice on sidewalks and store floors and the beginning of our Western holiday season was nearing. Internet did not really exist, Amazon was just taking its first baby steps, and we could only receive care packets that would fit into the pouch, in general no bigger than a shoe box. The local bazaars were empty, farmers waiting to grow their produce again in the spring - for now only being able to store and sell winter vegetables, such as beets, onions and potatoes. Fish and chicken were available, displayed directly on the tables, no freezer needed in the subzero temperatures of the unheated bazaar halls. The refuge to our Western comfy food became a shipping container in the backyard of the Embassy. The container was half "commissary" and half video store, and housed a refrigerator sized freezer holding meats from a local German butcher who sold his wares out of the trunk of his old car. The commissary half offered ant traps, batteries, very crumbled but delicious tortilla chips, some basic toiletries and some even more basic canned food staples.
With Thanksgiving and other holidays coming up, there was a need for special items. A shopping list was distributed to all families, which listed the items available at the much better stocked commissary in Moscow. Items such as marshmallows, cranberries, canned pumpkin and turkeys were just a pen stroke away. The individual lists were combined into one enormous American expat holiday wish list, and a driver designated to drive with a van from Kiev to Moskow and back! Our feast would be accomplished by driving 10 hours each way, more than 500 miles, in Russian winter conditions. I am not sure if we all knew at that point, what a task this trip would be. As the days went by and the weather changed for the worst, we had all succumbed to the fact, that Thanksgiving would not be happening or at least be delayed because the van could not make it through the snow back to Kiev. However, the driver, our hero, whose name I can't remember, made it back safely and on time. I hope he knew what it meant to all of us, being able to have a real Thanksgiving turkey.
About a year later, we moved to Berlin, and my husband and I tried to figure out, how we can return the gift of an unexpected Thanksgiving dinner to someone. We had gotten to know one of guards on our compound very well. He was a young burly man from the Alabama, loved living in Berlin but missed his mother's homemade grits. It turned out, the night of Thanksgiving, he was on duty, and so we decided we would bring him dinner to his small office in the basement, where he took breaks between rounds and watched TV. He was visibly touched when we brought him Thanksgiving dinner, and I was hoping it would be a little taste of what he was missing from Alabama. The next day I found out that this young man had two Thanksgiving meals right after one another, since our neighbor had the same intention we did.
This is what Thanksgiving should be about: sharing a meal with someone and reminding ourselves to be grateful every day for the people that have crossed our path and left a mark. Not the Black Friday deals, the Kmart store that keeps its doors open for 48 hours straight and not about the pushing shopping mob that runs over the employee who opened the gates to the consumers' paradise. Maybe by spending more quality time with the ones around us, by celebrating that less is indeed more, we can boycott the disappearance of this truly American holiday.
Wishing everyone near and far a wonderful Thanksgiving!
