Thanksgiving in the US

This celebration is one of the most loved by the Americans. The festivity, officially named a national holiday in the 19th century, although it was first celebrated by the pilgrims in 1621, aims to be thankful for the harvest in the precedent year. Although there is some controversy about its origins and whether if this celebration may be founded in the defeat of the native Americans by the European immigrants, there is still a great attachment to this day and its meaning. In the US it marks the start of the so called "Holiday Season", which continues until Christmas time and New Year. 

The reason why it is so appreciated is that this festivity involves many good aspects: a lot of food, family and friends. Since it is one of the few four-day weekends in the year, many people fly home to celebrate with family or old friends. 

The traditional dinner is centered on the turkey. It is in fact so important, that this day is often called "Turkey Day". Additionally, there are many other typical dishes, like stuffing (usually cooked out of the turkey), mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie etc. Food is abundant for that day and the following, in fact one of the most loved things about Thanksgiving day are the leftovers. 

And how do we celebrate Thanksgiving? Even though we don't relate to this festivity from our culture, it is easy to get get infected by the excitement of the Americans, what is not to like? For the past two years, we have been embedded with the feeling of giving thanks accompanied by friends. We called it "International Thanksgiving", and invited the people that are like us: away from home, with no real tradition for celebrating this day, but willing to spend a day together and eat, drink and laugh. We have a couple of pictures to share, let's go through them.

This year we doubled the number of attendees (last year we were 8). We were supposed to be 22 but in the end we only had 16 people. If we continue this trend, next year we might need to rent a bigger room ;)  The picture above shows a curious behavior that we observe every time that we have people coming over: no matter how big the house is, everybody stays in the kitchen. It must be the different smells....

The turkey needed around 4 hours to cook, a painful time for everybody, but totally worth it. The turkey master delivered the best quality meat to the hungry guests.

Eventually, the wait was too long and people started seating, waiting for the feast to get started.

 This celebration feels like a Christmas dinner with friends for me and many others not used to Thanksgiving. And thinking about it, it is kind of the same feeling: the year is over, we have reasons to be thankful for what we got, and we love to spend hours in good company and with good food. The main advantage of the Thanksgiving celebration is that you don't have to plan and buy presents for everybody!

We hope you enjoyed seeing us enjoying ;) Amazingly, 2014 is almost over, one more year that goes by so fast... We hope for next year to be slower, so we can enjoy better the last third of our journey in the US.

Thanks for reading, 

Lita&Andres