The Thanksgiving Trilogy

The Thanksgiving Trilogy

Thanksgiving doesn’t exist in France. Most Americans, including myself, have never spent the holidays outside the United States, and therefore never had the occasion to realize that the holidays we celebrate in America are not celebrated by every person, plant and animal on the planet. Granted, some of the holidays we honor are widely recognized, but until you spend the season in another country, it never really clicks. I was shocked to find that the word ‘Thanksgiving’ can slap a quizzical furrow on the brow of a French person faster than you can say nutter. I assumed most of the world would have at least heard of it, you know… turkey, football, family, pumpkin pie…but if the French are any indication, most people, plants and animals on the planet don’t even have a clue about Thanksgiving.

The French think turkey is only for Christmas and they consider it beyond odd to buy the bird at any other time of year. One reason may be that most French people do not have freezers large enough to store a 14 pound turkey- their cars are the size of American freezers if that gives any context. To drive home this point (no pun intended…), you are hard pressed to find the large bird anywhere at all during the month of November, unless you go out and shoot one yourself (and because of the strict firearm regulations, you will be shooting it with a large rubber band and probably should be wearing good running shoes.)

Football in France is played with a round ball you don’t touch with your hands- Wow, what an ingenious idea! A game that is played with a ball that is actually maneuvered by feet- and calling it Football. I am not sure why the U.S. adopted the same name for a sport played in an almost exactly opposite fashion, with a ball shaped like a pomme de terre that only one person on the team actually gets to fondle with his foot. Well, Handball was probably taken, Throwball just sounds silly and Tackleball would have been too obvious, so why not be cheeky and call it Football!

And a tarte made with pumpkin? That is enough to elicit a slight swoon and an Oh la la from a good two thirds of the French population. Most American mouths, on the other hand, are conditioned to salivate at a simple utterance of the two words ‘Pumpkin’ and ‘pie’ used in conjuncture. Some overly zealous individuals actually give a ‘yip!’ (that would make Pavlov’s Dog proud) when they hear the twang of aluminum from a whip cream as it is pulled out of the fridge.

So basically, lots of Americans don’t have a clue that other non-American folk don’t have a clue about Thanksgiving… unless you are one of the select few that enjoy pondering those random sorts of things as I do. What is Thanksgiving like in France? Oh, but do they have Thanksgiving? They must have a French version maybe at another time of the year? Other countries seem to have some sort of Independence Day, why not Thanksgiving? Dang, I wish I had the internet!

Sorry, getting back on track… but then again, I could have easily pictured French people celebrating Thanksgiving with a feast of stereotypes- dining on frogs and snails, snorting merrily at the tickle of their thin curly mustaches and shaking their white gloved fists at nothing in general. I admit, yes, there are escargots in the freezer at the grocery store, frozen in a sauce that is an unnatural shade of green, but I have not seen frogs or their legs in any culinary areas, nor has anyone shaken their fist at me… or at least while I was looking at them.

The more I realized how little other people know of Thanksgiving, its history and tradition, it made me feel different, and admittedly, a bit special. I am from a genuinely mixed and matched family tree that does not have extremely strong ties to a particular cultural background. I am Native American, Irish, English and a few other things knocking about that have all melded into the carbon mass that is myself, and when I travel, I always feel a bit culturally lacking- a feeling that may fuel my fascination with cultural immersion. But being able to teach and experience the history and traditions of my own culture with others, made me realize that as Americans, while we are still a young and ethnocentric melting pot of cultural backgrounds, we also have strong commonality that can be seen clearly when you step away from the whole. It helps you realize who you are and appreciate where you come from. You can’t truly be proud of who you are without realizing and appreciating the fact that you have been given something valuable that not everyone shares, and in my case, Je suis Américaine.

Thanksgiving I- Chartres, November 15, 2006

The first episode of my Thanksgiving trilogy included no less than ten Americans, two English, two Canadians and one Scottish person. I was invited to the flat of a fellow American teacher in Chartres for a conglomeration of random Thanksgiving dishes. Chartres is about 40 minutes away from Nogent le Rotrou by train so I happily accepted thinking this may be my only chance to partake in a traditional Thanksgiving this year (or as traditional as you can get in France.) Our hostess and some of the other teachers in Chartres had visited Paris to gather rare, made-in-the-USA goods from one of the ethnic grocery stores to buy the proper fixings for the dinner. They made dressing from baguettes, cooked a chicken (as mentioned previously turkeys are harder to get than an audience with the Pope) pumpkin pie from scratch, and everyone contributed that special culinary item that makes them think of home. There was a festive turkey table cloth, turkey napkins and paper plates that had been sent in a care package from the states. We ate on lawn furniture and folding tables and it didn’t feel much different from being at the kiddie table back in Texas, (even though it has been years since I graduated to the ‘big people’ table.) I was a bit skeptical about the stuffing, being as that is my favorite dish of the day, but it turned out to be quite tasty, it was a bit oddly textured, usually it isn’t crunchy, but it was lovely nonetheless. France itself showed up a couple of times during the dinner, with its quirky normal sense of humor and flair: including squishing 15 people into an apartment too small for a person and a roach to live together comfortably and random surges and overloads that had the power shutting itself off every 20 minutes.

The most interesting part of the night was when we went to catch the 10:00 train and found out that our train schedules had been misprinted and there were no other trains back to Nogent that night. Having to work the next day, this was not a good situation, so the SNCF (the main French train company) hired a Taxi to drive us 55km to Nogent and fronted 120 euros for the fare. I could write a novel on the eccentricities of the train system, so I won’t dwell, but I felt I got the better end of that deal, and that is saying a lot when it comes to trains, (she says as she does a victory dance that involves much bottom shaking and taunting gestures directed toward the train station: me…1, trains…0)

Thanksgiving II- Nogent Le Rotrou, November 18, 2006

My second Thanksgiving was a complete surprise. It was one of those- brother’s, sister’s, cousin’s dog is throwing a dinner kind of situations, so I was pleased to be invited. We have a Chilean assistant teaching Spanish in the high school in town. We never saw much of him because he lives with the sister of one of the other Spanish teachers and her family-Beatrice, Guillome, and their two toddlers, Petit Guillome and Francois. Well, come to find out, Beatrice and Guillome have traditionally hosted American assistants so each year they partake in a Thanksgiving dinner. Through a complicated grapevine of Beatrice to Ronato (guy from Chile) to Alice to Karolyn and I we got another Thanksgiving invitation .

At first the dinner seemed a bit odd, mainly because I associate Thanksgiving so heavily with family and we were going to have Thanksgiving dinner at someone’s home we had never met, but that soon melted away and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. You see, quite simply it boiled down to one fact…Guillome is a chef. A good chef. And although we had pork instead of turkey, and a vegetable medley with mice on top carved out of radishes instead of dressing, it was fantastic. We had bought a chocolate and pear cake as a thank-you gift and felt silly realizing that we just bought a cake for a chef, a French chef for that matter, but we stuffed it in with all the rest, it was chocolate for goodness sake! The entertainment of the evening was provided by Francois, who is two and has learned a new phrase: C’est pas ma faut! He would happily smack his older brother or steal his glasses and heartily exclaim “It’s not my fault!” I have found it to be a very useful phrase, in all aspects of life, especially if you are an adorable two-year-old with a funny laugh, who likes to put radish-mice down the blonde American’s sweater.

Intermission… Teaching, well, trying to teach, Thanksgiving

In between all the surprise Thanksgiving dinners and celebration preparation, I was attempting to teach the history of Thanksgiving to my classes. It was a bit difficult for me to explain religious persecution, a transatlantic voyage, the fact that turkeys are not chickens, and that the Indians and Pilgrims were actually friends to six classes of 8-year-olds who had never even heard the word Thanksgiving. I delved into the dusty file cabinet that is my brain and decided two of my favorite things to do at school during Thanksgiving time were to make hand turkeys, and construct pilgrim hats or Indian headdresses. After explaining some of the history and my family’s traditions in broken French, a chalkboard and master miming, I let the kids choose if they wanted to be a pilgrim or an Indian. One of my students got a bit confused and asked for Cwwoowwbay. Huh? Cwwwwoowwbwwaay? After about four times I realized he had asked for a Cowboy hat. I said ummm ok, but this is a pilgrim hat (repeat after me pillllgrimm) and showed him a picture of a pilgrim, complete with tights, buckles and bloomers. Either he had never seen a cowboy and thought a cowboy wore bloomers, or he just preferred to think of himself a cowboy in a fashionable hat with a large buckle, because the next thing I knew he had taken his scraps of paper and forged a gun- a gun to shoot Indians… which he proceeded to do enthusiastically, as Indians made up three fourths of the class. I halted the Indian hunt and explained again, to the entire class, that the Indians were not for shooting. Indians and pilgrims were friends, and pilgrims hated violence, and if the pilgrims shot the Indians with guns they would have starved again the next winter and there may be no America as we know it, and…… sigh. By that time the idea had spread and there were five rouge and murderous French pilgrims (or couture cowboys) on the loose. I think I have officially, even if accidentally, taught that cowboys were at the first Thanksgiving… shooting Indians. Oops.

Thanksgiving III- Nogent Le Rotrou, November 23, 2006

The final installment of my Thanksgiving adventures was by far the most work, but also the closest I came this year to having the Thanksgiving I know and love. We decided to say thank you to some of the teachers we are close to for all the help they have given us and the lovely dinners they have invited us to by cooking them what we consider an appropriate Thanksgiving dinner. We each contributed a couple of food items that were our favorites of the day, and I decided that cornbread dressing and fruit salad would be my contributions.

Dressing in our family is a massive undertaking. It is everyone’s favorite dish and if you mess it up- if it is too dry, or has too much sage, or a bit on the mushy side- they can tell and it is all down hill from there…the day is just a bit less enjoyable (well basically they turn on you like a rabid Roman mob at a public execution-well minus the rotten vegetable throwing and the dead person of course.) So in other words, you have to know what you are doing. Well, I have never made dressing before, unless you consider pouring boiling butter-water over Stovetop proper dressing, which I do not. I have seen it done my entire life but never ventured into the fire, so I figured- I am in France, why not? They don’t really know what it is supposed to taste like right? But then again, I am cooking something ridiculously difficult to make correctly for a group of people who pride themselves on being fantastic cooks, no matter what they are cooking. But I threw caution to the wind anyway like a rotten cabbage and ventured forth with new courage, but there was one huge problem… Cornbread mix doesn’t exist in France. And it happens to be made of 90 percent cornbread. So not only did I have to make dressing for the first time, I had to make cornbread from scratch. Way to plan ahead, Carey! Bravo.

So that afternoon we went to L’Eclairc, a huge grocery store on the outskirts of town and stocked up. Our menu included a chicken, seafood gumbo, yams, green beans, dressing, fruit salad, a strawberry sponge and a pumpkin pie from scratch. We suffered through the translations and ingredient gathering then made our way over to the teacher’s house where we were commandeering her kitchen. We cooked for six hours. My test batch of cornbread came out well so I decided to go forward with the dressing. With my Granny above guiding my hand with the measurements (they don’t use cups and ounces here), and my mom’s fancy e-mail instructions, I slowly but surely created a masterpiece. The dressing took ages to cook, so I was becoming worried that it was going to be more of a cornbread soup, but it eventually firmed up and turned out fantastic. I was so proud of myself I didn’t really care if anyone liked it or not, because I knew if my family had been there, they would have liked it, and for me that was the best judge. I imagined them hoisting me up on their shoulders and parading me around the living room in triumph as I shook my clasped hands over my head heartily congratulating myself as they fought feverishly for all leftovers. Our dinner guests did seem to like it, they had never had dressing made that way, nor had they experienced yams, or fruit salad with dinner (they kept protesting it was desert and I insisted, no you have to eat it with everything else, and they finally came around to my way of thinking and even had seconds.) The pumpkin pie was a group effort and surprisingly another culinary triumph although the crust was bit doughy I didn’t mention it and it hid itself well, he-he.

Everything turned our so well that I could almost close my eyes and pretend I was sitting at my own Thanksgiving table smelling familiar dishes and listening to my family make jokes and tease each other. I imagined friends popping round the next day to scarf leftovers and watch the Aggies beat Texas in Austin. Whoop! And it all made me incredibly homesick. We tried to recreate the things that are important to us, sharing the things that make the holiday feel like ours, but the things that are the most important to me at Thanksgiving are the things you can’t replicate, and only you can appreciate fully, my family and their quirky humor, my friends and their enthusiasm for life. The things we chose to share with the others- the dishes and traditions we love, without being overly sentimental, really represented those more important things we couldn’t have with us.