My celebration of Thanksgiving

Celebrating Thanksgiving in the United states of America

This year, I celebrated my second real Thanksgiving. Ever. Thanksgiving is only celebrated in the United states of America (and, of course, U. S. territories) and Canada. Thanksgiving always happens on the fourth Thursday in November, followed by the infamous Black Friday. I will not bore you with history of Thanksgiving holiday, I would just like to present the idea of it. It started because people were thankful for the generous harvest and wanted to celebrate that fact and show how thankful they are for it.

At the beginning, I mentioned that this year, it was my second real Thanksgiving. The explanation is pretty simple - when I lived in Barcelona as an Erasmus student, I was working in an English school as an assistant, and they did a little celebration of Thanksgiving at that school. In fact, that whole week was dedicated to learning more about that special holiday. We did not get to eat turkey, though. That is the reason it was not a ‘real’ Thanksgiving.

How does a Thanksgiving celebration look like in the United states of America?

Most American families love to prepare their own traditional Thanksgiving food, and then they invite some of the closest friends and/or family members to celebrate with them.

My employers told me that, in the past few years, it is becoming more and more popular to buy pre-prepared Thanksgiving food, because some people are simply too busy to prepare everything. There is another option, that is the simplest and requires no effort from you, meaning no cooking, no cleaning or anything else. Some organizations and country clubs around here are offering Thanksgiving buffets.

What does that mean? You go there, pick your food, eat it, refill your plate as many times as you want, and pay. The price is always the same for buffets, regardless on how much food you eat. The hardest part of buffets is deciding on which foods would you like to eat, because the selection of the Thanksgiving foods they are offering, is simply extremely overwhelming.

This is how the buffet at a local country club looks like - each family books a table. You need to be a part of the country club to attend the Thanksgiving buffet though.

So, the usual Thanksgiving family tradition in the United States of America consists of sitting around the table together as a family. Each family member tells things they are thankful for, such as family, health, friends and other things, then it is time for eating Thanksgiving lunch or dinner.

I think that not taking things for granted is more important nowadays than it ever was, and therefore we should always tell our friends and family that we are thankful for them, and Thanksgiving should be just another, more special opportunity to do so.

The Thanksgiving lunch at the country club was quite fancy. They even had a dress code that we had to follow.

Typical Thanksgiving foods

The most important part of every single Thanksgiving meal is, of course, the turkey. And the sauce that goes best with the Thanksgiving turkey, is, believe it or not, the cranberry sauce. It does not sound like a good combination, but it is delicious. Turkey is also usually paired with mashed potatoes or green bean casserole and gravy.

So many different foods to choose from... And you can try them all!

More food...

My first plate of Thanksgiving food.

A traditional Thanksgiving dessert is the pumpkin pie. If you do not like the taste of pumpkin puree, you can put loads of whipped cream on top. Well, I like pumpkin puree, but I still put whipped cream on top. You know, just because.

A few words for the end…

Thanksgiving is definitely one of my favourite American holidays, mostly because of all the new foods that I got to try. I also think it is nice that there is a special day, dedicated to being thankful for something. But, on the other hand, we should be thankful for things and people every day, not just once a year.

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