Hosting Thanksgiving dinner is a big deal. It's even more of a big deal in a foreign country where it can be tricky to find the ingredients you need. Add to that living in student apartments without the space to host a large dinner and no car for transporting groceries, and you have a logistical puzzle. But, where there's a will, there's a way.
A scouting trip to the closet major grocery store near my house revealed that turkey, pumpkin pie, sweet potato casserole and cranberry sauce could remain on the menu, as long as we were willing to make them from scratch. Watergate salad (or what we call "green stuff" in my family) was a no go however.
An early Happy Thanksgiving email to my family on Thursday morning prompted me to look at how long I'd need to defrost our bird in the fridge if we were celebrating on Sunday. I suddenly realized that the answer was I should start defrosting it now. So, after my first class of the day I biked to the store and bought a 17 pound turkey. While I've gotten better at balancing my bike with packages hanging from the handlebars, I don't think I'm up to the disequilibrium that something that heavy would cause, so lucky for me, the turkey just fit into my backpack.
Next on the to-do list was finding a venue. Fortunately for us, all the student apartment complexes have "common rooms" that you can reserve. So Alistair reserved a room and I swung by the student housing office on Friday afternoon to pick up the key. When I got home Friday evening, I decided to stop in and scope out the room. Much to my dismay, the key I was given didn't open the door. I tried again. I've been known to be slightly key-challenged, so maybe I was just doing something wrong? Nothing. Suddenly our whole plan seemed to be crashing in around me. We had 17 people scheduled to show up on Sunday and it looked like we might not have a room. I was imagining us sitting on the floor of my apartment, eating out of paper plates. Not really the best Thanksgiving dinner scenario.
Since I was biking (again) on Friday and had bought poster board downtown, I'd asked a friend who happens to be a neighbor if he'd take it back with him on the bus. So, when I called him to get the poster board from him I asked if he'd see if he had any more luck with the key than I did. He didn't. I realized that maybe the lady at the housing office had given me the wrong key, so we went off to see if we could find the other common room in the complex. The exterior door there was open, and the housing office key let us into the common room. My immediate relief was followed by disappointment. The room was ugly, windowless, with a broken down pool table on the floor and not enough chairs to seat everyone. To make it worse, the kitchen was also locked, and, you guessed it, the key didn't work to open it.
As I was mentally trying to come up with plan C, some random inspiration made my friend try his key in the kitchen door. It opened. Thoroughly confused, but glad at least to have access to a kitchen on the premises, I figured the rest of the details would work themselves out. Another random moment of inspiration led us back to the first room where my friend's key worked on the outside door and the key from the housing office worked on the inside door and voila, we finally had a (somewhat) better place. At least there was enough seating and no broken pool table.
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| Prepping sweet potato casserole on Saturday |
So, Saturday back at my place, Alistair and I, with the help of our friend Paulina, made all the desserts and prepped some of the other food. And Sunday morning, at the early hour of 7 am (made even earlier by the fact the sun doesn't even rise til 9:30 here right now) Alistair showed up and (using my friend's borrowed key) we let ourselves in to the common room and started cooking away.
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| Necessity is the mother of invention |
The turkey came out perfect. An olive oil bottle worked just fine for mashing potatoes since we didn't have a potato masher. My cranberry sauce gelled. In short, all the disasters that could have happened didn't. Thanksgiving was an amazing success. None of our guests had celebrated an American Thanksgiving before and almost none of them had eaten a whole turkey. They all waited anxiously for it to come out of the oven.
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| The two American co-hosts and our perfect turkey |
As we shared about our American traditions and history- pumpkin pie and breaking wishbones, the Macy's day parade and football, Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians- it was so fun to see people experiencing Thanksgiving for the first time. We went around the table and all shared one thing we were thankful for.
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| Guests from around the world experiencing their first American dinner (in Finland). |
For me, I was thankful for friends. Thankful that despite being far from home and family, I was surrounded by people who I could share Thanksgiving with. That's what I said. I was also thankful for this plate of food and pulling off Thanksgiving without a single mishap.
Of course, Thanksgiving dinner isn't complete without dessert. "Let me put this in perspective" I told our guests. "This year at home, there were only 8 people at my family's Thanksgiving celebration, and I think they had 4 different desserts. This is the one day a year when you can eat as much dessert as you want and not feel guilty. Please, try everything. We want you to." Alistair and I weren't sure if our 2 apple pies, 2 pumpkin pies, 1 chocolate mousse pie, brownies, and ice cream was going a bit overboard. But hey, there's no such thing as too much food at Thanksgiving.
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| An apple pie and a chocolate mousse pie, made by me with some help from Paulina |
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| Some of my favorite people in Finland. :) |
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