Four Thanksgivings

This year we had the tremendous pleasure of planning four Thanksgivings with different groups of friends. The month of November has been full of fun plans so I've been loading the boys with vitamin C and drizzling oils on them for weeks in case anyone dared to get sick. Don't even think about getting sick! YOU WILL NOT RUIN MY FUN HOLIDAY PLANS, SO HELP ME!! Aaaaaaa!!

First Thanksgiving

Shortly after we arrived in Germany, about eighteen months ago, I met an American woman with two daughters going to the same schools as my boys. She introduced me to another gal, who introduced me to the third. Each of these three women came to Germany about fifteen or so years ago for a cultural exchange program. Each of them met and married German men and stayed here. They are totally assimilated into German life, but still want to celebrate the American holidays. They speak to their kids in English, who are all obviously half-American, but the kids mostly respond in German. And when the kids do speak English they have heavy German accents. It's the cutest thing!

So these three gals, who have this interesting life story in common, were nice enough to invite my family to an early Thanksgiving dinner. I had never been to the hostesses' house before so when we arrived we were pleasantly surprised to see that she lives in a very old, traditional Bauerhof, or farmhouse. I always want to see inside these places! You enter from the street through huge doors into a central courtyard surrounded on the other three sides by the farmer's home, the barn and storage rooms. Her original house is many hundreds of years old. They don't even know the actual age. Inside the house you can see all the exposed beams. It was so cool!! It was like old rustic-cozy but with modern updates.

Inside the courtyard looking toward the storage rooms.

The beams!!

Eight adults and thirteen kids. What a gang!

It was fun to try everyone's specialty or old family recipe like red beets with hard-boiled eggs, Grandma Somebody's rolls and the best fresh cranberry salad I've ever had.

The boys had a wild cage match on the trampoline. Only a few tears, bruises and bloodied gums. Nothing out of the ordinary! 

The post-meal, post-digestive-Schnapps walk, as you do.

Helping Toby pedal up the hill.

Such great kiddies!

After the walk, some of us went back to the house to thaw and get dessert ready, but the farmer and a few others from the group went out to collect eggs from their chickens. Our family is in disagreement as to how many chickens they have. It's either 300-something or 700-something. Anyway, it's a whole lot of crazy chickens. They graze out in the field and go back into their mobile coop to lay eggs and sleep for the night.

They get moved to a new patch of field every day.

They sell out of the eggs everyday in their little shop inside the courtyard.

Meanwhile, inside the house...

My friend brought several rolls of wool for the kids to make friendship bracelets!

I don't think I can fully express to these ladies how meaningful this invitation was to me. The fact is, they don't need me. They don't need to make more friends. They have fifteen years worth of friends, family, neighbors and community filling up their lives. They didn't need to reach out and include my random family, but they did and it means more to me than they will ever know. All three of them (and their husbands and kids) are so fabulous and fun to hang out with! I am grateful for them and for every minute of our time together.


Second Thanksgiving

This next group of gals, if I may be so bold, do need me and I need them. One is my neighbor and another is a friend I met at soccer practice. The three of us get along famously and we have in common the fact that we're American families living here and figuring stuff out together. We try to get together once a week in the morning to chat, connect, and fill each other up with support (and coffee). I'm so grateful that we found each other since we're all here alone and have to build our own community. They are just what I need. Now I have to get the three of us and the three gals above together!

Everyone came to our house for the feast. One family is vegetarian, so we went all-veg which is more than fine with me. Turkey preparation is just gross. We had some traditional dishes and some not-so-traditional. I love tasting different versions of recipes!

Look at all those happy faces!

Aren't they adorable?
*wool friendship bracelet from First Thanksgiving shown here. Hearts.

My house every second of the day.

Then one kid suggested playing chess and all the other kids yelled, "Yeah, chess!"
What happened? What planet am I on??
I don't think the game went much further than what's shown here.

Third Thanksgiving

This was a special dinner because it was actually the real Thanksgiving Day. Marc had the day off and right after Tobin got out of school we drove about forty-five minutes to Mainz to see our cute friends, who I consider our first friends since living here. We had Thanksgiving with them last year, too. They live in a sweeeeeet apartment in the city, are considerably younger and are always cracking us up with their hilarious stories. It's always a treat to hang out with them. They invited a few other friends of theirs to experience the holiday - a half-French/half-Luxembourgish med student who speaks at least four languages, plays the piano and looks like he could be the next face of Acqua di Gio - a Renaissance baby, basically, a French gal and her Iranian-Dutch husband, and his colleague, a Greek guy living and working at a German university. This dinner was definitely a more gourmet take on the traditional recipes. We would have loved to stay longer for chatting and piano karaoke but were the only ones with kids, one of whom desperately needed to get to bed. Some people just can't hang!

Fourth Thanksgiving

A few months ago, before we had any Thanksgiving plans at all, we were talking with our German friends whose daughter is in Jonah's class. Somehow we got on the topic and told them we would love to have them over for a "real American Thanksgiving". Now this was an exciting idea for them because they didn't even know what it entails. Thanksgiving dinner is the only "authentic" American food I can think of that only we (and Canadians) can make properly. It's nothing special or gourmet, but there are certain ways of doing things.

Welllllll, it was a bust, in more ways than one. Doren woke up that morning with red scab-like spots all over his chin and the back of his legs. I hate it when I don't know what to call the "sickness" and therefore don't know what to do about it. And everything always happens on the weekend when doctor's offices are closed. Just when I was going to call my friend to cancel, she called me and said that her son was up all night throwing up. I swear, these kids. I knew we were on borrowed time as it was without anyone getting sick until now. Four Thanksgivings was just too much to hope for. But I was already in the process of making all the food and quite poorly, I might add. The turkey was like rubber, the stuffing was soggy and the green bean casserole was watery. I wanted to make them really traditional stuff, but I failed like a champion. So she came over when it was all ready and took home half of everything I made along with my apologies for a less than stellar first taste of the Great American Meal. I had to explain to her, "You put the gravy on the stuffing and the turkey. Eat it with some cranberry sauce if you like it. These beans are supposed to be creamy. This is pumpkin pie. Yes, pumpkin."

It turns out Doren caught the very contagious Hand-Foot-Mouth virus that's been going around. It sounds like some awful, flesh-eating disease, but it's kind of like chickenpox with painful, itchy red dots that will go away in a few days. Fingers crossed this doesn't spread to anyone else.

And it was Marc's birthday, but when she came over to get the food she forgot to bring her contribution of a chocolate dessert, which was supposed to be Marc's birthday cake. Sorry, dear. It was kind of a miserable, rubbery, soggy, itchy, crying Fourth Thanksgiving/Birthday disaster.

It's been a busy November filled with great friends and a...lot...of...cooking. I'm infinitely grateful for each unique person, for how they enrich my life and for making us a part of their holiday and I'm never roasting turkey ever again because it's disgusting.

I'm telling you now - it's great to be around you!