Happy 2nd Thanksgiving!

Welcome, engorged reader, as I write to you in the bloated aftermath of our second Thanksgiving here in the US. The pandemic meant it was rather different to our first attempt, and rather different to how we might have planned it, but nonetheless, we chose to make the best of it and put in a concerted effort to make it as archetypally American as we could muster.

Thanksgiving here in the US claims to be a lot of things. From the UK, we view it as something of a commemoration of the Pilgrim Fathers celebrating their first successful harvest this side of the pond. Now I don't like to disillusion you, but the holiday has about as much to do with that as mistletoe and fir trees have to do with the birth of Christ. What you have here is something approximating what in Europe we'd call a harvest festival, bowdlerized by hundreds of years of history repeatedly being rewritten by the victors.

But in the same way that debt and family arguments are traditional fittings of a British Christmas, the Thanksgiving dinner is the big focus of the holiday. This year we went all-in on cooking our own version of multiple traditional dishes to give us that genuine Thanksgiving dinner feel. Fowl-loving reader, I give you, the smallest turkey we could buy (12 lbs, thanks for asking):

So, roast our turkey we did. I've roasted a lot of things, but never a turkey, and wowsers, doesn't it take a long time? We ended up pushing back the zero hour for dinner from a distinctly un-American 13:00 (here in the US, lunch starts at 11:30) to an even more British 2pm or so.

Now if only I'd done my preparation properly! As an aside, one of the people I follow on Twitter is Meghan McCain, daughter of former Republican presidential candidate John McCain, and regular talking head on morning TV show The View. Meghan's been waxing lyrical this week about how her late, great father made a mean deep-fried turkey, including videos showing him doing the deed in what appeared to be a dustbin full of hot oil (fill in your own punchline using this as a metaphor for Republican policy). Now this is the kind of thing that I'm likely to write off as something that only happens in the more, er, Trump-supporting states, until my friend Mike from New Jersey, normally a pretty grounded individual, sends me a video of him doing exactly the same thing!

Absolute *scenes* from New Jersey earlier in the week.

One thing led to another, and now I just find myself hoping that Santa has the $99 spare to get me one of these. When we return home and reflect on our adventures in the US, I'd really like to be the only person in the UK with an electric deep-frier for turkeys.

The traditional Thanksgiving turkey comes with an array of side dishes: green bean casserole (green beans cooked in soup, topped with crispy onions), sweet potato casserole (mashed sweet potato, topped with marshmallows... yes, really!), mashed potatoes, rich stuffing (ours included sausage, cranberries, walnuts, and probably the odd fingernail), and buttermilk biscuits (scones, more or less). Dear reader, we cooked all of this, and by about 2pm it was all ready:

Of course, it was all delicious, but I have to point out that of that 12lb turkey, we managed to consume one leg between the two of us, so there's plenty more to have later.

Dessert of course needed to include pumpkin pie. Helen's very much up for this, but I have to draw the line somewhere, so I had apple pie instead. For me, pumpkin pie is a charlatan and an imposter: it looks a lot like a treacle tart, one of the best desserts on the planet, but it's actually, well, a pumpkin pie, which isn't. Due to the size of the main course, dessert waited until 4pm or so.

So that was Thanksgiving, and very nice it was too. Good job really, given that we'll probably be eating the leftovers until Christmas. That seems appropriate, given that the modern day function of Thanksgiving is to keep Christmas at bay; but now the starting pistol on Yuletide fun is well and truly fired. It'll be a different Christmas for us again this year, as the pandemic means we can't travel and it'll just be us here in sunny Palo Alto. Now, about that tree...