Thanksgiving

What's the best way to celebrate an American holiday in a country that doesn't recognize it? I remember Thanksgiving being one of the hardest days of my time in China two years ago. In fact, Thanksgiving was much harder than Christmas, because all my foreign friends wanted to celebrate Christmas and only the very very small handful of us Americans even knew that the third Thursday of November was anything special. So this year I just wasn't going to make anything of it.

As expected, my Thanksgiving was indeed turkey-less, mashed potatoes-less, cranberry sauce-less, even (biologically speaking) family-less. But it certainly wasn't friend-less.

My American friend A and I ended up spending the entire day together as a holiday baking day. And let me just say, there is nothing quite like holiday baking done in a country that has just recently been introduced to the oven! In fact, our morning started by going out and buying an oven. And by oven, I certainly don't mean one of those convenient devices built into your kitchen that becomes a temporary home for your 20lb turkey during the hours leading up to your Thanksgiving feast. I'm not sure a 5lb turkey would fit in the kind of oven we have to work with. Perhaps that's why we ditched the turkey idea.

Perhaps also because turkeys don't exist in China and are therefore outrageously expensive to purchase. Yeah, that could be it, too.

So we went and bought an oven. We got quite a few stares as we carried this (surprisingly not-that-big) box down the street from the electric market back to my friend's apartment, but I can never quite tell if the stares are because we're carrying an oven down the street or because we're white. Could be either. I would go on to tell you now about the difficulty of getting this new oven up the multiple flights of stairs in my friend's elevator-less apartment building, but that would be a lie. The oven is so ridiculously light, it took basically no additional effort beyond that of simply climbing the stairs regularly. In fact, it was so easy that we then went to my apartment to carry our oven over to A's apartment for the day. Carrying oven #2 down the street? Definitely more stares.

Despite our early morning (okay, okay, 9 a.m. ... which in a country that is bustling by 5 a.m. every morning is not actually early at all), it was already lunchtime by the time we had purchased all the necessary ingredients and equipment (the oven being utmost among them). Being Thanksgiving Day and all, we certainly needed to eat lunch. Japanese rice bowls from the street vendor it is! Woot! Turns out whoever decided Thanksgiving should be about turkey has never tried our Japanese rice bowl place. It's definitely something to be thankful for.

Then to the baking. No day of baking is ever complete without some sort of mishap in the kitchen, but again, baking in a country that just met the oven is really just asking for trouble. Why does my brown sugar taste like ginger? Is this thing I bought actually a pumpkin or am I making an "unknown vegetable" pie? How do I turn the oven on? Why did the oven turn itself off (in the middle of baking that tray of cookies)? Will this yeast rise? Uh-oh, how do we make the yeast stop rising?!

Somehow, by the end of the day, our endeavors proved worthwhile. Nearly 75 crescent rolls, 100+ speculaas cookies, and 3 pumpkin pies later, the apartment smelled better than ever before and we were pleased! Now hopefully all our non-American, never-experienced-a-real-Thanksgiving-before friends will enjoy the goodies at our Thanksgiving/family dinner on Saturday. We might not have the turkey, stuffing, or cranberry sauce, but we have rolls, cookies, and pumpkin pies. Not bad!