Thanksgiving as an expat

Thanksgiving is weird in Spain because, unlike Halloween or Christmas, the people here have no idea what the holiday is about. So there are no festivities and no holiday spirit bursting out of people. I spent Thanksgiving day teaching all my little kidlins about the Pilgrims and how important Thanksgiving dinner is. The concept of Black Friday astounded them no end, not surprising since I think it's all pretty crazy and I've grown up with the event.

We managed to score a turkey for our dinner, which we held on Saturday. Dan, my apartment-mate has been tutoring for a pretty well-off family and he happened to ask where we could find a turkey in the fine country of Spain since they aren't all that common. Turns out the family has a farm, and offered to kill, butcher, and defeather a turkey just for us! So we had a very fresh bird for our dinner. So Saturday morning I woke up, stuck the turkey in the oven to slowly roast throughout the day, and made some brownies for dessert.

Then I went to the bus station to pick up my friend Baxter, who came over from Granada to visit for a bit. I took him downtown to the medieval festival that was going on. There were lots of craft booths, homemade food booths, and a couple restaurant stands where we grabbed some drinks. A medieval festival in Spain has overtones of the Arabic culture though since the country was occupied by Muslims from 700 AD to almost the end of the 1400s. So there were musicians playing Arabic music walking the streets. I was going to give Baxter the big tour of Baeza, but it was freezing and then it started to rain so we headed back to the apartment to hang out.

Later that evening we gathered up all our food and headed over to our friends' apartment where the celebration was to take place. It was an international Thanksgiving and I think all the Europeans involved began to understand why we enjoy the holiday so much. I mean, who wouldn't be excited about a holiday dedicated to eating lots of great food. We had turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, apple cobbler, mashed potatos, pasta, corn, and green beans. We stuffed ourselves silly and went back for more. All in all, there were 16 of us there for Thanksgiving, 10 of which were from somewhere in Europe and 6 of us from the United States so we were way outnumbered. My new family had a blast though and we rounded out the night by watching Love Actually, ringing in the Christmas season.

On a somewhat related topic, but not continuing the above story: we got our Christmas tree yesterday! We had to order it and were a bit worried that it would turn out to be an olive tree (the only tree that you see when you ride the bus anywhere around here), but it's a genuine pine tree that smells exactly like Christmas! yay!