Thanksgiving

Given that it�s that time of the year and I keep reading Turkey stories, I thought I�d contribute my own on that quintessential American holiday, Thanksgiving.

The first point to note is exactly that: it is a quintessentially American holiday. It�s amazing how many otherwise intelligent Americans don�t seem to know that. I know American culture has permeated the world, but not so much that the rest of us celebrate a holiday that�s linked entirely to the founding of the US. (We don�t celebrate the 4th of July either, guys).

Yet when living in the States the amount of times I was asked �Do you have Thanksgiving in Australia?� was just ridiculous.

There were plenty of silly questions, but most of them were fun. Question: �Do you really drink beer out of those giant cans?� Answer: �Yes.� Real answer: �Those giant cans are made solely for you international suckers and don�t even exist in Australia, but we do tend to drink a lot so its not that far-fetched.� But �Do you have Thanksgiving?� definitely took the cake.

That out of the way, having lived in the States I have done the Thanksgiving thing, and the first was certainly the best. My two roommates and I piled into the car the day before and headed down to the home of the only one of our collective parents to actually reside in the same state, Greer�s mum. Sorry, mom.

Now Greer�s mom was a generally highly competent lawyer, but she was also notorious for not cooking and living generally on junk food. She had been known to have the phone company do an emergency break-in to a phone conversation to ask Greer or her brother what kind of take-away she should bring home with her for dinner.

So Greer, Dada and I volunteered to do the cooking. For us, Greer�s mom and brother, grand parents, several aunts and uncles and the neighbours down the street.

We braved the Thanksgiving-Eve supermarket in order to buy strange products like pumpkin in a can and frozen orange juice. We stayed up late into the night drinking and making stuffing with more butter than I have used in the rest of my life combined. We got up at 5am to stick the huge turkey into the oven and then went back to sleep.

We got up at 7am to start cooking properly, and putting that frozen orange juice to use in a fruity concoction that also contained Southern Comfort and Mountain Dew. Don�t know how I ever drank the stuff, frankly, but I did. We were well and truly pissed by noon though for some reason Greer�s mom couldn�t figure out why we were so giggly.

We made stuffing and yams and more stuffing and jello salad. Jello salad. I�m sorry, but what exactly does jello filled with Marshmallows have to do with salad and why the hell is it part of the main meal? We made mashed potatoes (thank God, something normal) and pumpkin pie. Where I come from pumpkin is savoury.

So there we are, two foreigners and a native Californian, drunk on Southern Comfort and shuffling between the identi-houses of Irvine where we had stuffing in three different ovens in three different houses that were very difficult to tell apart from the outside.

We were drunk enough that I don�t really remember the people arriving or any of those details, but at some point we got dinner served and sat down to eat at two tables. The relatives table in the dining room, and the rabble rousers table in the kitchen. Greer, Dada, Greer�s sixteen year-old brother, her mom�s neighbours and I were the rabble. Greer�s mom shuttled between the two tables � she wanted to be the rabble, but had to do her hostess duties with the relatives.

Now Greer�s mom�s neighbour � whose name I don�t remember, but really should � came from somewhere in Eastern Europe and had a relatively thick accent. She was the life of the party, but you had to concentrate to get some of the punch-lines and none of us was much capable of concentrating. For this reason I don�t remember the substance of a particular story she was telling, and I�m really not sure I heard all of it at the time. All I know is that the punch-line was that she�d laughed so hard that her tampon almost popped out.

Now imagine hearing that from a drunk person in a thick accent who is hyped up on twelve kinds of sugar and laughing hysterically. None of us quite understood what she was saying and asked her to repeat it. This led to some interesting charades, and the whole table laughing hysterically before we even understood what she was saying. Dada was the first to understand, and she started laughing so hard she literally fell off her chair. And then had to explain, in her own not-as-thick accent, from her position sitting on the floor under the table.

None of us could stand up for quite some time afterwards. Actually, we couldn�t much speak either. Certainly couldn�t tell the relatives in the other room what was so funny.

It became the phrase that could make any of us burst out laughing for months afterwards. We may have lost touch with Greer and live in different countries again, but it can still get to Dada and me now.

After the Turkey and stuffing sleepiness won its battle with the sugar high, I think we retired to the couch to watch a Twilight Zone marathon and groan.

All in all, not a bad first go at Thanksgiving. And that butterific stuffing was totally fantastic.