Thanksgiving

Last night I attended my first Thanksgiving feast of the season (tonight is the second). You would expect, of course, that an American abroad wouldn't celebrate Thanksgiving at all, but Brits are very happy to share this tradition with us. Last night's meal was hosted by an American friend and her British husband, and the guests included her visiting friend from D.C., me and 7 Brits. Tonight I'm eating with a British family who adopted the tradition after spending two years in Seattle.

Before last night's meal, we three Americans were quizzed at great length about Thanksgiving traditions. Here is a sampling of questions:

"Why do you eat cranberries with the turkey?"
"What time do you eat the meal?"
"What do you eat for breakfast?"
"What do you do after the meal?"
"Which teams are playing American football today?" (to which the three American ladies--2 of them expats--all shrugged their shoulders. We sure didn't know.)

Finally one of the Brits turned to his friend, who was doing most of the questioning and said, "Didn't you learn anything from watching 'Friends'?"

If I haven't mentioned it yet, the Brits love the television show "Friends." Now I am just the right demographic to have grown up with "Friends," as it started when I was in high school and continued through my early 20s, but back home, it seems, the only people who know "Friends" so well as me are other women in their 20s and 30s. But here in England, everyone knows "Friends"..moms, dads, grandparents, little kids. That's because it is always on. I quickly discovered how fun and easy it is to nattily toss in offhanded references to "Friends" episodes here in England. It's great that we have this cultural touchstone. However, I must admit to airily doing the same when I was home in Chicago at a party last August, and that instead of the room breaking out into a congenial snicker at the shared memory of the episode, I was met by a roomful of blank stares.

But back to Thanksgiving. A few other amusing cultural jokes have arisen in the past few days, namely that of the post-Thanksgiving Christmas cheese.

Yesterday morning I was chatting about the holiday with my friend Jida, who is from Israel.

"And afterwards you put up the trees, right?" she asked, from across the noisy room.

"The cheese?" I asked, confused. I hadn't heard right at all.

"No, no!" Jida exclaimed. "The Christmas trees."

"Ah, that makes more sense," I said, relieved and laughing as my imagination took off. "You weren't asking me about that grand old tradiiton of hanging Christmas cheeses on the wall after all, then, were you?"

We chuckled a bit, but we laughed much harder when, a few minutes later, someone from the other side of the room asked in genuine curiosity, "So what is this you were saying about the American tradition of hanging Christmas cheese after Thanksgiving?"

And that, my friends, is how rumors start.