"I hate eating turkey" says English boyfriend to American girlfriend on Thanksgiving
Yawning, Stretching, and wishing the alarm wasn’t so early, 200,000 Americans will wake up in Britain today. (Gosh, can you believe there are so many of us here?)
Today, we will have one thing in common, because its Thanksgiving back home!
An interview:
“What is Thanksgiving again?” says Mr. Chill, my loved-up Northerner.
“Is it a festival of Thanks or something? I remember seeing it in John Candy films. It sounds like a sneaky marketing opportunity. Am I going to be quoted on your blog about this?”
“Oh honey”, I say, “We’ve had this conversation last year– its where people celebrate what they are thankful for, remember?”
“Well, I hate eating turkey”, he says. “Its one of the ugliest creatures on the planet. Its so ugly it makes me sick to think of eating it. Its head is too small for its body and it has a bingo wing for a chin. If someone has said that all turkeys on this planet were going to be extinct, I wouldn’t be sad, I would even rather see rattlesnakes survive. Actually this is not a bad idea. Who were the pilgrims again? Is it a celebration about when they landed or something?”
So thus I start to explain why us Americans celebrate thanksgiving.
“When the pilgrims first landed upon our shores they encountered the first native people, who shared with them their harvest so … wait, look, here is a picture from google images!”
“Hang on” he says, “What went wrong? I thought the pilgrims shot them all and became your gun-crazy Americans?”
“Never mind…”, I say, and give up trying to explain the logic of it.
This will be the first conversation of many that I will have trying to explain our Thanksgiving celebrations today.
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I always tell people that we don’t exchange presents on Thanksgiving. People don’t really understand that.
WE understand though – Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!
I’m thankful for this blog letting us share some laughs and blow of steam every once in a while.
Turkeys are mean, too. I grew up on a kinda-farm and there’s turkeys there. They are CRANKY SOB’s…
But I’m vegetarian so it doesn’t really matter!
Happy Thanksgiving my fellow awesome Americans!!
There are some very good children’s books on the subject. I bought my kids one each, and I learned a lot in a very painless way. Perhaps you need to go this route…
And if turkeys are so horribly ugly and don’t deserve to be on this planet, then he should be grateful for Thanksgiving, when they all meet an untimely end.
nNehvm Thanks for good post
I suspect that not all US citizens understand what Thanksgiving started off as, in the first place. Why do I suspect this?
I visited the USA at that time of year once. Several yanks asked me – in the full knowledge that I am British and live in Britain – what I would be doing at Thanksgiving. Would I be visiting my family perhaps?
I was required, each time, to explain that not only does Britain, and in fact the whole of the rest of the world outside of North America, not celebrate this event; but also WHY we don’t celebrate it. And that I would be working that day, because it is a normal day.
I was a little surprised. Surely US citizens would automatically assume that the whole event is not applicable to other countries? No? Apparently not.
In return I explained why Britain celebrates November the 5th. So everyone was happy.