Thanksgiving,

I sometimes bemoan the vanilla nature of my Anglo culture. We don’t have any Day of the Dead with prancing skeletons in diorama; the ghoulishness of Halloween has been hi-jacked by sweet furry animal costumes and scantily clad Disney princesses. We don’t typically fast, except for a few weeks pre-bikini season. Arguably, we have little in the way of ceremony beyond marriage and death. We don’t even put hexes on people or issue fatwahs. But we do flip pancakes and roll large cheeses down hills, and we do burn effigies of treasonous Guy Fawkes on bonfires, which is perhaps gruesome enough. All in all, we have a pretty interesting history of torture and conquest but it’s not really something that we bring up over dinner.

So, Brits and Americans have something in common: Our high days and holidays, at least in their secular rendition, are now 90% about food. Whether it’s because we spend the rest of the year being bombarded with healthy eating trends, gym membership specials and weight loss success stories, along comes a holiday we go hog wild. Fat Tuesday is at least unapologetic about it. Easter should be renamed Chocolate Fest. Christmas might deservedly be Cocktail Carumba, and Thanksgiving just gives us free license for third helpings when we wouldn’t normally have seconds. Take eggnog, when else would we freely and willingly drink high balls of sweetened heavy cream? It’s as if my free will and mental faculties have been replaced with nothing but desire every time I open the fridge door.

Thanksgiving morning in our house resembles the day after a keg party. Young houseguests are randomly littered about on sofas like rag dolls fired out of a cannon. The giant turkey that has dominated the fridge for days is suddenly the star of the show as its legs are unceremoniously stuffed in its neck and its innards are swapped out with an autumn medley of apples, onions and garlic. I manage to feel bad for him whether it’s the glorious fulfillment of his destiny or his darkest hour. But payback is sweet, so this year he kept us waiting a full extra hour before his popper popped.

Thanksgiving is one of those occasions when the hour or two spent eating doesn’t seem to justify the hours spent in preparation. I tried to quantify it for analysis:
3 hours grocery shopping and unpacking
4 hours cleaning the house and making guest beds
1 hour comprised of 2 last minute trips back to the supermarket
4 hours baking cookies and mince pies
5 hours dressing the turkey, peeling and cooking the vegetables, and making green bean casserole and firecracker cornbread from scratch.

That’s seventeen hours of labor swiftly dispatched for 2 hours of non-stop grazing time. And then we all sat around like a bunch of heavily pregnant women groaning about how much we had eaten. I could probably add in 2 hours of clean up, if, like us, you used your Kate Spade wedding china, which is all hand wash.

Among holidays, Thanksgiving takes the biscuit in its extraordinary homage to food. The inclusion of mandatory traditional dishes is only half the battle; gluttony and over-abundance also taxes the load-bearing capacity of any dining room table. And so the days following Thanksgiving are nothing short of an Ode to the Great Gastronomic Spread. Oh, Thanksgiving, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways you that will be reincarnated and re-served. I’d have rustled up a turkey pot pie or bubble and squeak but this year my husband took charge of the leftovers with a personal reinterpretation of a friend’s recipe. The result? The ultimate cross between a cottage pie and lasagna: a base of pie crust layered with stuffing, turkey, roasted vegetables, gravy and cranberry sauce topped off with smashed potatoes and baked. Don’t turn your nose up, it was practically Biblical.

That’s where we could leave things, plump and heavily satiated for another year. The trouble is Christmas, now a mere four weeks away. If Thanksgiving is our annual shout out to American holiday tradition, Christmas is when I bust out the best of British with Yorkshire pudding, bread sauce, crispy roast spuds, and a beautifully trussed turkey gracing the table. And with my parents hopping the pond to join the feast, the pressure’s on. After going PC with the addition of Pilgrims and Native American Indians to the children’s Little People play set, we decided to up the ante. I’m not quite sure what the neighbours will make of the Union Jack now gracing the doorway along side the Colonial American flag, but it does make for a doubly festive statement.