French Thanksgiving

No, there wasn’t a Thanksgiving holiday in France; we both worked Thursday and Friday. But we did celebrate Thanksgiving on the following Sunday. We visited the home of another American couple, Gerry and Amy with young son Benjamin, who invited us and 2 other couples (both American women with French husbands, each with 2 kids) for dinner. It had snowed the night before, enough to make the ground white before melting by the afternoon. But Gerry and his son had used every scrap of snow in their yard to build a snowman over 5 feet tall.

We had a full Thanksgiving spread with turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy, creamed corn, mashed sweet potatoes, cranberries, bread, and for dessert pumpkin and sweet potato pie. The turkey was cooked by one of the Frenchman (he went to college in Texas for several years). He had reserved a turkey at a local shop, but when he went to get it in the morning the owner didn’t have the turkey. He then spent the morning driving around to each of the stores in the area until he found one that had turkey pieces: 4 legs, 3 wings, and 2 breasts. We were impressed that he went to so much effort. The mutant Maddenesque turkey tasted great.

We brought bread and wine as our contribution. Standing in front of the huge wine area at the store (seriously, wine typically takes up both sides of a full grocery aisle) we suffered selection crisis and picked something mid-priced with a nice label. To our relief, one of the Frenchman gushed over a bottle we picked.

We had a great time at dinner, both of us miss American food. Our social network is growing, activities are increasing, and contentment is settling in. All good signs that we may survive the rest of our stay.