First Thanksgiving

For me it was easier to give up Thanksgiving.  For sure it used to be nice to see everyone on the holiday, but we’ve already moved far away and I feel like I’ve already said my goodbyes.  But for Val I think it’s harder, especially because we used to do Thanksgiving with her family.  We originally were just going to ignore it completely, but then just a few days ago Val informed me that she had ordered a turkey.  So Thanksgiving was on!

But then we had to decide when to do it.  Obviously our initial thought was to do Thanksgiving on Thanksgiving – on Thursday.  But because its not a holiday here, everyone has work that day and some people have work or school Friday morning.  And after talking to a few other Yanks who have been here a few years, apparently one of the things to do here is to just do it Friday night and make that shabbat a combined shabbat-Thanksgiving.  So although today is actually Thanksgiving day in the US, we will be celebrating tomorrow.  On the menu is turkey, stuffing (with homemade breadcrumbs from two loaves of as-close-as-we-could-get-to-white-bread since we couldn’t find any actual bread crumbs), brussel sprouts, sweet potatoes, and of course, pumpkin pie.  

And while there is no Thanksgiving here, believe it or not, there still are:

you guessed it – Black Friday sales! And while the big stores show no signs of it, we luckily did find a smaller store which seems to cater more to the local American crowd which was seasonally stocked:

In case you can’t see it, next to the Gefen brand canned peaches, are three varieties of canned pumpkin pie filling; right under the graham cracker pie crusts.  And, we were even able to order the turkey from this store.  Which was cool because apparently nobody does that here.  If you ever try to order an entire turkey, for any reason, ever – its apparently a dead giveaway that you’re an American.   Not that there’s anything wrong with that….😀😀