Thanksgiving

I'm not sure how many people we ended up feeding over the course of this Saturday, but it was over 16. Which I think is pretty darn impressive for a dorm kitchen. We made everything on one stove and with one oven. The maintenance people are replacing a lot of the kitchen furniture in various flats, and currently have it stored under the stairs, which was handy for us because it meant that we had access to a bunch of extra tables and chairs which we liberated for the day.

The pies and cranberry sauce had all been made the previous day, and I got up at 8am to start the turkey cooking. To be fair, I promptly went back to sleep- but still! 8am! Meredith and Tim made all the mashed potatoes and stuffing and sweet potato casserole and cornbread. When Sarah arrived she brought marshmallows and cans of Campbell's cream of mushroom soup from America for the sweet potato casserole and green bean casserole. We had to be authentic you know. (The French kids asked if all the food was authentic: yes- very. Impressively so.) Anyhow, enough with the self congratulations. (But it was pretty awesome. Gotta say.)

The other thing we did was resurrect a tradition from elementary school- namely tracing your hand and making a turkey out of it. We made everyone do it and then write their name and what they were thankful for before blue tacing it to the wall. The non-Americans kept asking if this was something we did with our families...no, not really. But everything else is totally like a normal Thanksgiving! We swear!

Before dessert we realized that there were eight countries represented, so I passed around a piece of paper to have people draw their flags on it. It was interesting to realize how much of a cult around the flag America has. Regardless of how patriotic you are, all Americans just know what the flag looks like. This is *really* not true for the rest of the world. Lawrence, who is from South Africa had to look his flag up online and even so forgot what it looked like. Dorothy, who is from Germany kept holding up the red, yellow, and black markers in different orders to see if she could remember what her flag looked like.

Someone asked Komsun to sing Thailand's national anthem so he did and then the French kids sang theirs. It was about 20 seconds in to a very loud rendition of the French anthem that I realized that all three of them were voice majors at Guildhall. The Americans tried to sing our anthem but Dave kept butting in and saying we were singing "God Save the Queen" which of course we were because none of us really remembered the words and were mostly just humming. Plus, after the rousing French we really couldn't compete.

I put up all the photos I took on flickr: http://flickr.com/photos/10933141@N07/

The pictures that are here are of Dave immediately understanding the whole point of Thanksgiving, a spelling war played out in hand turkeys, the turkey (that I didn't realize was upside down until I started trying to carve it, oops), and my hand turkey.