My first American Thanksgiving also happened to be my first Colombian Thanksgiving. Now, Colombians don't actually celebrate Thanksgiving, but because my school is kind of American, we got the day off. Only they don't really "get" Thanksgiving, so we got Friday off instead of Thursday.
Anyway, my colleague Karen had previously made noise about trying to make some pumpkin pie when Thanksgiving rolled around, so about a week ago I reminded her of this promise, since I love pumpkin pie. Well, we eventually decided to make a whole Thanksgiving dinner, so on Thursday we headed to the local supermarket for supplies.
The biggest question was what we would use for pumpkin, since there are no pumpkins here, and there certainly isn't canned pumpkin. In fact, I haven't seen any pies here (that's sort of a lie, I think there are frozen Sara Lee or whatever ones, but I haven't seen any at bakeries), and after asking a couple of Colombians, we discovered they don't even have a word for pie.
Anyway, we found what we decided was the closest thing to pumpkin, which became known as "The Thing", because we forgot its name. Here's what it looked like:
Yeah, I dunno, some kind of hybrid squash/pumpkin/green thing. It actually smelled/tasted more like pumpkin than anything else. Upon the recommendation of Karen's relatives, we baked The Thing for a few hours to soften it up for the pie. When we took it out of the oven, we really had no idea if it was good to go, but Karen decided to live by the tenet "as long as you can stick a fork in it". I decided this was a lesson that should be applied to many facets of life.
The other challenge with the pie was that we didn't have a pie pan, so we ended up making something more like pumpkin pie squares, but in the end it turned out pretty well.
The rest of dinner consisted of a chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, sweet potato carrot purée, a Rooke/Rutt family tradition (with The Thing substituting for sweet potatoes), and a salad (Karen took pictures, if and when she puts them up I'll let you know). Pretty traditional Thanksgiving stuff. We had briefly considered the fact that, since Colombians don't celebrate Thanksgiving and don't have any expectations, we could really make anything we wanted and claim its place in the Thanksgiving canon, thus enabling us to include dishes such as nachos or pizza or whatever. In the end, though, we went traditional for our own sake, even if we were celebrating on the wrong day (and in the wrong month).
While dinner was distinctly North American, the guest list was distinctly South American: by which I mean, highly subject to change. When my mom asked how many people were coming I said "somewhere between 5 and 12". When the designated time rolled around, it looked like we weren't even going to fit into that overly broad range; there were only 3 people, Karen and I and one guest, our co-worker Cecilia. Fortunately, Elizabeth, who had been feeling very sick, mustered enough energy to join us, and brought her boyfriend Yoyi. And continuing in the Colombian tradition, 2 more guests wandered in at various points. Though this meant they got cold food, it also facilitated another Thanksgiving tradition: seconds (and beyond). Each time a new guest arrived, everyone (or, at least, I) went for a new round of food, partly to keep the new arrival eating-company, and partly (okay, fully) because Thanksgiving dinner is great.
After dinner, the traditions continued with the traditional loosening of the belts and the traditional almost falling asleep on the couch (despite the lack of triptyphan (I'm sure I'm engaging in yet another Thanksgiving tradition of misspelling that word)). We finished off the wine Cecilia had brought, and soon we were all snugly in bed, full and happy. A very successful Thanksgiving.
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