A Little Bit of West in the East

As you know, we live in the Middle EAST.

As you know, Thanksgiving was last week.

As you know, that is a 100% WESTERN holiday.

As you know, we couldn't let a holiday pass like that being un-celebrated.

So, this is how you pull off a WESTERN holiday in the Middle EAST.

{WARNING: it is not easy}

Step 1: You get very nervous that no turkeys are showing up in the local grocery stores leading up to Thanksgiving. You block out a day near Thanksgiving to drive 4 hours up and 4 hours back to the capital to buy a turkey OR you put a friend in the capital on stand-by to buy a cooler, buy a turkey, and send it on the bus down to you. But, you rejoice when you get text messages from every foreigner you know in town the day turkeys arrive to the local grocery store. You run to the store and pay $65 for an 18 lb BUTTERBALL turkey. Then you come home and try to figure out how to squeeze a frozen 18 lb turkey into your tiny freezer.

Step 2: You google a lot of really strange things.

Google Search: can I freeze celery {because celery only shows up every once in a great while at the veggie man and if you don't grab it when he has it, your celery recipes will, well, lack celery}

Google Search: what is cream corn {because your Aunt Dena's cream corn recipe needs cream corn, so if you have to 'fabricate' it you wonder if you just dump regular corn in the blender to make cream corn}

Google Search: how do you cook a pumpkin {because, gasp, there are no cans of Libby's Pumpkin Pie mix to be found this year, so, gasp, you have to get pumpkin from A PUMPKIN to home make all the pumpkin recipes}

Step 3: You have to field funny questions from your neighbors. {In our last apartment, we received a knock on the door as the turkey was cooking. The smell was apparently wafting through the entire building. The knocker was designated by the other neighbors to come and ask if we were cooking pork. No, we said. It was our Thanksgiving turkey. He explained he had never smelled either. Then asked if his family could join us for Thanksgiving. The more the merrier!}

 

Step 4: You have to look for hidden treasures in the ingredients. {It seems that all the flour here is laced with bugs. Yum. So, not only do you have to MAKE the cornbread {no Jiffy Mix} for the corn casserole, MAKE the spice cake for the pumpkin pie cake {no Betty Crocker}, and MAKE dinner rolls {no Great Harvest Bread Co}, you have to SIFT ALL THE DRY INGREDIENTS in case there are hidden treasures. I only found a few this time around.}

Step 5: You invite people over that have become your family away from family. You eat till you can't eat no more. You all crash in the living room in a food coma. Then you play reruns of Charlie Brown and How the Grinch Stole Christmas. That's what we did. {And since it was 90 degrees out the 'kid table' got to be outside.}

Step 6: You eat tons of leftovers for days and days with no microwave to heat them up in because it was an knock-off Chinese thing that caught on fire a while back and you never bothered to replace it for fear of a second more disastrous fire.

And that, my dear blogging friends is how you bring a Western holiday to the East. 

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

Now I'm off to figure out Christmas!