Thanksgiving

I can never remember when Thanksgiving falls because it's a moveable feast. I mean it doesn't fall on the same actual date each year, but on the third Thursday in November. It doesn't appear in British diaries, and that's my excuse for forgetting it until Hanna reminded me.

I actually prefer Thanksgiving to Christmas because it has all the best ingredients of food, friends and family without the need to shop for presents that people don't really need. My friend Trevor Gunton thought that this was the ideal model for a "Yorkshire Christmas" and that we should all adopt it! (Yorkshiremen like Trevor are famously reported to be "like Scotsmen, but with the gene for generosity removed".)

In reality, Thanksgiving is more like Harvest Festival than anything else. If you look for artwork on the 'net, you might expect red, white and blue stars and stripes, but it's all golds and browns; corn and pumpkins.

We don't have any American friends here, so my Hanna puts on a special meal for Dan's carers, especially the ones who have left in the last year or are about to leave us. This year, carers Hannah and Nina are both very pregnant, but they did us proud by turning up and eating all the food we put in front of them! It was lovely to for us to have them around with one of our newer carers, Georgiana who did a good job of looking after Dan while we got the food organised.

To get in the mood, we tuned-in to a few US radio stations on iTunes. We like the PBS stations in Minnesota and Maine best.

On the surface, I guess a Thanksgiving turkey dinner is much like a typical British Christmas dinner, so we try to add a few trans-Atlantic features, but stop short of using jello-salad or coolwhip because Brits just don't get it. This year we had some lovely cranberry jelly that contained an eating apple and whole cinnamon stick; sausage meat-balls with cherries, and a Mexican stuffing made from corn-bread and peppers.

For desert? You guessed it; pumpkin pie and a fruit crumble with whipped cream.


Mmmmmm.