Is it Still Thanksgiving if…

I have been having Thanksgiving in roughly the same place with just about the same people my entire life.  It is these family traditions and rituals that make life rewarding, fills our heads and hearts with memories.  The sights, sounds, smells and feel of these family events are comfort food.  They have morphed over time.  People have come and gone:  Divorce, death, moves out of state, have transformed these holidays.  The location has scattered from Southfield to the Silverdome, Bethesda, New York, the Poconos. But the basic set up is always the same.  Certain essentials persist.

Until this year. 

Imagine a Thursday in late November with no Macy’s Day Parade, no old-timers football game, no last minute drive to the store, no Black Friday sales.  Imagine the Wednesday before without the office talk of where you are going, the incessant traffic and weather reports.  Imagine no AAA announcements about how many more/less people will be on the road this year versus last.  

Instead an officemate asked me:  "Is it always on Thursday?"

So instead of lacing up the tattered cleats for old guy football, I donned khakis and loafers for an American Thanksgiving Day Service at St Paul’s Cathedral.  Since the Detroit Lion game didn’t start until dinnertime there was no need to be home and eat lunch on the couch.  So we ate out and bumped into a mild UK celebrity who was worldly enough to wish us a Happy Thanksgiving.

My mid-afternoon ritual of running to the store was relatively unchanged except that finding a Whole Foods in London via the tube was a lesson in orienteering.  I needed to buy ten 500 g servings of stuffing since the British chef who was cooking our Traditional Thanksgiving fare refused to make stuffing without pork.

Dinner wasn’t in Manhattan, but Notting Hill.  It wasn’t in a living room, but a pub.  We weren’t surrounded by aunts and uncles and cousins, but by friends. 

Instead of lamenting another Lion Thanksgiving Day collapse at dinner, this year’s point of contention was trying to watch the game on our laptops through the restaurant’s spotty WiFi connection.

And instead of nursing my football injuries on Saturday and watching Michigan/Ohio State, we were on a train headed 2 hours North for the Manchester United v Newcastle football match.

And so back home, this very American tradition lived on with its overdose of football, family and faux pageantry, but without us. And although we love it, we didn’t miss it.  In part because it didn’t feel anything like Thanksgiving here.  In London they call it Thursday. 

And then it hits us.  A delayed reaction perhaps.  Now that we see the pictures and hear stories we realize it really was the fourth Thursday in November, and the parades occurred and the games happened and the traditions carried on. 

But we had something else.  We created new memories and a special day, indeed, but was it still Thanksgiving?  I’m not sure you can have Thanksgiving without being in America.  This was a very special holiday in London.