Hungary 2008!!: Thanksgiving with 13A

Thanksgiving was an interesting holiday this year. I had a class of “school leavers” (seniors) who really wanted to celebrate the day of Thanksgiving. I wasn’t sure why, but when we talked about the first Thanksgiving in September they perked up and said “we should do that.” It was one of those things where I initially thought – ok yeah sure – let’s do it, and I knew that it would never happen. As we moved closer and closer through the year though, they continued to talk about celebrating Thanksgiving. I reminded them that it would occur shortly before their big prom, when they’d be practicing their class dances and waltzes several times a week, and also preparing for some big winter exams. They didn’t mind and said that they were still interested in doing it. So, I began delegating out the food and fixins. Ániko enthusiastically raised her hand and shouted “I call the garlic bread!” I’m not sure where she got the idea that garlic bread is part of the traditional American Thanksgiving, but whatever. Kriszti wanted to make cranberry sauce (though in reality it was really made out of lingon berries – not sure how it got lost in translation but it was good anyway) and another girl piped up and really wanted to make pumpkin pie- okay – go for it Betti!!! Szandra wanted to make the “smashed” potatoes and Nika was all about making bread. The girls were pretty fired up, the boys not so much so, until I talked with them about the drinks… I said to the students that I would not be providing alcohol, but if some happened to show up at my place, there wasn’t much I could do about it. They are after all legal here and have been for two years. Then the boys perked up and started discussing what type of pálinka they wanted to contribute.

We discussed the issue of the turkey quite a bit. When I asked the students about it, they thought that it was possible to get a turkey in Hungary, but they weren’t sure where. Ok, well I’m not going to go off on my own and try and find a whole turkey. AND if you really think about it, with my luck, I’d end up at some sort of turkey plant where I would have to chase down the turkey I wanted and then kill and pluck it myself. Not going to happen. Ultimately, we ended up getting rotisserie chickens from TESCO – it worked out fine.

When it came down to it, we had 8 kilos (17 lbs) of “smashed” potatoes (in addition to the ones that I made) garlic bread, ligonberry sauce, pumpkin pie, bread, peach pálinka, and the rest of the goods brought by the students were desserts. I made a lasagna, also not really traditional, but would feed lots of people. I also made dressing (which was really good might I add) and gravy which wasn’t so good but worked. The kids thought that everything was delicious, but were a bit skeptical of the dressing and the gravy. The dressing had huge raisins in it, and despite the fact that it was bread based – which their entire diet is – they hadn’t seen it prepared like that. The gravy threw them I think because they didn’t really know what to do with it. The garlic bread was a hit – as were the desserts. We watched a movie and afterwards played “Apples to Apples.” The game was funny to play with them because though they have a deep English vocabulary, our humor is different when there are cultural references that they don’t know. For example, the tag word was “horrible” and one student played the card “SPAM.” He thought it meant the spam you get in your e-mail, but it actually was referring to the “meat” made in Austin, MN. Personally I don’t think Spam is horrible and I explained to him that it was insulting that he would choose something Minnesotan to associate with “horrible.” The students (about 15 of them) got to my house just after 1:00 and didn’t leave until 9:00. It was really a nice way to spend an evening, and I was thankful that they followed through and actually came to celebrate with me.