Give Thanks With Food
I got invited to spend Thanksgiving with Mary and her family, my first ever Thanksgiving. At the end of November families gather together and as I found out, eat large amounts of food. I don’t know a lot about the history of Thanksgiving, but from how it was told to me: The colonies that had travelled from the UK to start a new life in America were suffering due to the harsh conditions and their inability to hunt effectively, as a result the travellers began to starve and would definitely not last the winter. The Native Americans saw this and decided to host a feast and help the ‘Pilgrims’ hunt and forage for food. This meant that the travellers could survive and establish their colony, leading to what we know as modern day America. This feast was kept as a tradition and now modern Americans eat a meal at the end of November to commemorate the shared meal.
This tale seems very wholesome and from what I found out many Americans see this as a holiday to eat as much food as possible and gather together with family and have fun. There are some similarities and differences between Christmas and Thanksgiving in the land of America. The first is that instead of turkey at Christmas, you have turkey at Thanksgiving, this has something to do with the wild turkey caught for the first Thanksgiving. You also do not typically exchange gifts at Thanksgiving although, one of Mary’s aunts gave us young’uns a tin of artisanal nuts each. In the spirit of both holidays, our Thanksgiving dinner consisted of: two types of potatoes; green beans; stuffing; other veggies in a casserole and turkey as well as all the snacks including: brie, dips, potato chips and nuts. There was so much food that some of it didn’t make it to the table and dessert was a whole other affair. There were at least 3 different pies, cream and cake. Overall, a lot of food was consumed and just as much was eaten over the rest of the break as leftovers.
Other Thanksgiving Day traditions include watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade which I watched form start to finish, a total of about 3 hours and an American football game which we watched the day after Thanksgiving. The parade was brilliant, it included dancing performances from various casts as well as floats each with a famous artist and massive balloons which were taller than the buildings on either side of the street. It was particularly cold this year with an average temperature of 0 in the New York Area, one of the coldest on record for this time of year. One of the most memorable floats was a giant Ronald McDonald, advertising the Ronald McDonald Foundation. Many of the floats are for charities or shows that are raising money or have ties to other organisations. It was really cute, but I don’t think I would ever see it in person, just for the fact that it is freezing cold and standing on the side of the street would mean you probably couldn’t see anything anyway. Although, seeing the size of the balloons in real life would be amazing. The football game the next day was between Mary’s Sister’s Uni (Virginia Tech) and another Uni in Virginia (UVA) and was a very close game, fortunately Tech won otherwise it would have been a very sad household. I still don’t fully understand American football but I’m working on it. I know enough to get excited when there are good plays, although when everyone else is making noises and shouting at the TV it would be hard not to recognise that something is going on.
Overall, I know that there is a lot of controversy surrounding Thanksgiving due to colonisation of Native American lands and (something that I know about) the carrying of disease to the Native American people, I think it was a good experience as it was and still is to some degree a part of American culture. It is something I want to look into further as many people are starting to boycott the holiday, it is a very interesting part of American History and to some degree British history.
