Two years ago, my partner and I went to an American Thanksgiving celebration in Munich hosted by friends from Singapore. Shortly thereafter, memories of turkey with cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie still on our minds, we decided to make Thanksgiving a feature of our intercultural life together.
Without thinking much of it a year ago, I suggested to my parents that they spend the following Thanksgiving in Germany. It had been strange, they said, celebrating with their friends and their friends’ children with none of their own children around. “So come to us,” I said, and they booked flights. “We’re hosting Thanksgiving,” I told my partner after one phone conversation not too many months ago. It took us both a little by surprise.
In the train station just moments after my parents arrived on Friday night, my partner turned to me: “I hope the turkey’s not frozen.” As a group, we agreed that it wasn’t and that we’d adjust if it was. In my dreams, I was up to my eyeballs in vegetables while my partner was out trying to catch the turkey, which had inexplicably morphed from being frozen to being alive. With our oven schedule dictating our Saturday morning alarm, we woke to the first blue sky seen in a week. A good omen if there ever was one.
Although we’d one day love a Thanksgiving with thirty-odd people, this year’s gathering was small. Along with my parents who spent the day preparing with us, doing the normal daily life things that people who live far apart don’t do together, we hosted my partner’s parents and a couple of friends who knew of Thanksgiving from American television and film. It was a first Thanksgiving to host, a first Thanksgiving to attend, a first Thanksgiving celebrated in Germany. Firsts for us all.
In the living room of our one-bedroom apartment, we rearranged the furniture to seat everyone around the coffee table. In the kitchen, we laid a table of turkey and cranberry sauce (the essential ingredient of which my parents brought from the US), two kinds of gravy, mashed potatoes, roasted vegetables, lemony rice, green beans, and baguettes topped with squash and ricotta cheese. Later came pecan squares, pumpkin pie, real whipped cream, and ice cream. We served beer, wine, and Glühwein (mulled wine), and rounded out the evening with a round of our favourite schnapps.
Somewhere between turkey and dessert, my mum suggested sharing what we’re grateful for. This is something my family has always done, and I told the group about the lists we have written in the past and tucked into the purple Thanksgiving folder that comes out once a year. With some wet eyes (or water in the beard, as the German expression goes) and pauses for translation into one language or the other, we went around the table and shared a little of what was in our hearts.
By the time the kitchen was clean in the wee hours of the morning, my throat was sore from talking and my face from smiling. Had gravity not been pulling me firmly to the ground, I would have soared. To look around a room and feel so much love, to hear the same well wishes and hopes spoken in different languages, and to feel so much at home among all of it is a moment for which I am thankful.
By Rebecca Michelle 