The Thanksgiving Miracle of 2010
Our plan was to buy a roasting chicken, some potatoes, lingdonberry sauce, frozen peas, and carrots, and pretend it was a turkey with mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, stuffing, sweet potatoes, and pumpkin pie. Meat is so expensive here that we have mainly been eating fish. And fish is so expensive that we have mainly been eating pre-packaged cod. Not exclusively on the no-meat or all-cod story but still close enough. But either there are enough Americans lurking around Bergen to make it commercially justifiable, or so many turkeys are slaughtered every year that there are more than that one country can eat, or maybe turkeys are just very cheap to raise but suddenly there in a grocery store’s meat section where it had never been before was a frozen turkey!!! Hang the cost we said, we’re buying. At the register we found out that the turkey was cheaper than a roasting chicken!?! And we found sweet potatoes and a butternut squash too which I was willing to try to contort into a pumpkin pie. The next day Gertrude, the secretary at Paul’s Bergen department, ran into him in a grocery store as he was puzzling over the Norwegian names for spices. “Ah yes, the American holiday.” she said, “But where will you get cranberries?” I don’t know where she got them but Paul found a package of whole cranberries in his office the next day. So we even had the makings for our *special* cranberry relish.
(This is not the first time that Gertrude has run into us standing around nonplussed in some Bergen store and saved the day. We call her our shopping angel.)
The pie might have been a little better if it had molasses and allspice which we didn’t find. And if it was made with pumpkin rather than squash. And if I had remembered to add the brown sugar when I was baking it. But other than that the meal was a roaring success. The oven worked which hadn’t been a given, the cranberry relish could have been made at home, the mashed potatoes, gravy, peas, sweet potatoes, and stuffing all worked! Best of all the apartment smelled like America.
There is so much to be thankful for. We went around the table each saying what came to mind like we do every year. Kaitlin was happy for her family. It’s a simple one to say but also huge – getting to spend this much time with Paul and Kaitlin in a non-school/ non-workday mode has been the best part of this trip. We could have spent from August to December in North Dakota with our special trip being to go to the Minnesota Mega-Mall and it still would have been wonderful because of being together. Sappy but true. Then we spent some time going over what we knew of our friend’s and family’s T-day plans each imagined feast making us happy. I was thankful for animals. God they put up with a lot from us humans. The ones that know us as pets love us unconditionally even if we don’t deserve it, the one’s who spend their short lives in horrible animal farms before they go to slaughter (what to say even?) and those in the wild just putting up with the environmental devastation we wreck as they go about their days living their lives. Some would eat us if they got half a chance and that’s cool they’d just be doing what they do. Paul was thankful for the moment: The meal, the candles, the smell of Thanksgiving, the sound of the Norwegian college students laughing as they walked down the street outside the apartment building.
