american new year

One of the pros of raising expat kids is you can pick and choose which American holidays you celebrate and which you forget. Since there's very limited commercialization and we don't get American holidays off--they (and sometimes I) have no idea when a holiday happens. Thanksgiving is not a holiday we skip.

It's one of our favorites and we want it to be one of our kids favorites. So on this holiday we go all out. We learned this year we have a lot of work to do.  When I showed up in Eliot's class to talk about Thanksgiving (she's the solo American in her class), she excitedly announced, "Hey everyone, my mom is here to talk about American New Year!"

After we cleared up the background and theory behind Thanksgiving--I love having a captive audience in which to brag about my Mayflower heritage. (It turns out this heritage is not nearly as exciting as the heritage Eliot has invented for herself--she's convinced she's part elf and our elf on the shelf, Hollypop is her great grandmother.) I had her class make posters of things their thankful for, turns out since most of her kids have English as their second or third language, the word "thankful" was not in their vocabulary. We told them to draw things that made them happy and I ended up with a poster full of pictures of Ben 10 toys.

This year we hosted our first Thanksgiving dinner. We decided to go big. We invited a couple families and then asked the missionaries if there were any of them that would like to come. There were. I think we ended up with about 25 adults. I'm not sure how many kids because I made them eat outside, picnic style, with Scooter trying to eat off their plates--I'm sure this only made it more authentic.

 Rocky was in charge of doing the centerpiece.

 I'm entirely convinced there is no food better than Thanksgiving dinner. I consider it the original American food.

 No such thing as too much pie.

 Best part of hosting, leftovers. Scooter is still feasting on ham. (Maybe on ham from Easter.)

 Post Thanksgiving breakfast: pumpkin and pecan pie with whipped cream. Which I assume is the exact same as a bowl of nut and pumpkin granola.

 The day after Thanksgiving we took advantage of having guests, we love guests, and headed out to the floating market, where we indentured our girls to a coconut sugar farmer. They didn't last. Turns out they don't work nearly as hard when they don't have friends around they can trick/goad into doing their jobs.