I am sorry it took me so long since
my last posting. But relocating across this big country (from Texas to
Minnesota) had taken its toll and – of course – a lot of paperwork was involved
as well. Alex is a little fed up with that.
Yesterday was a special day.
Thursday. But no ordinary Thursday – Thanksgiving Day, an official holiday. A
lot of employees drive home visiting their family for a long weekend or have
vice versa their family staying at their place. Lots of traffic on the highways
and airports (and a horrible accident yesterday morning on I-10 east of
Houston), in front of many houses in our neighborhood park more cars than
usually. Our apartment complex seems to be a little emptier; for Alex and me,
Thanksgiving feels like Sunday. Maybe not exactly alike because most stores are
closed for this “family holiday”.
Thanksgiving is an opportunity for
family meetings like Christmas is in Germany. Though it seems similar,
Thanksgiving in the US should not be
messed up with the German “Erntedankfest” because it is not really connected to
Christian traditions (the Canadian one is, according to the internet).
Instead of being thankful for the harvest (only), it is a more general idea of
being thankful for everything good that had happened in the last year. Its
origin is being somehow related to the pilgrims of the Mayflower who would not
have survived their first winter without the help of the Native Americans. They
celebrated a big feast together (and later the pilgrims showed how thankful they were by
treating the Native Americans the way they did …) and the traditional meal
today still relates to what they had nearly 400 years ago: turkey, corn, sweet
potatoes, carrots … and apple or pumpkin pie as a dessert.
We ate everything but traditional:
rice, mixed greens and fried chicken bits in cream cheese gravy. By the way, it
was completely “made from scratch”. I have heard this phrase a lot in the past days and it took me some time and the help of
an online translator to get the meaning of it. I assumed right that this phrase
is similar to “of good quality”, but the literal translation to German just made no sense.
I am proud to say that nearly all of the stuff I serve is made from scratch.
Like this:
 |
| ... fresh from stove to table ... |
 |
| ... made from scratch ... |
 |
| ... no leftovers ... |
I also found out that Thanksgiving
Day is traditionally linked to “Wipe out Wednesday”, “Black Friday” and “Small
Business Saturday”. All days are synonym to “Hey folks, Christmas business has
started! *ka-ching*” At first I tried to give Black Friday a historic meaning,
but except for the beginning of the worldwide economic crash in the 1920s, I
found no references. And that one simply made no sense. Steph helped me out and
taught me that Black Friday is the day when all businesses having operated red
numbers earlier, are back in the black now. And according to the jammed parking
lot of the local Apache Mall this afternoon, people up here in Minnesota are
really into the “Black Friday super savings” offered by every store. Maybe
because it’s that cold outside (tempatures dropped in the past 30 hours from the 50s to the 20s), who knows … And the competition of decorating
your lawn with the most LED supported Christmas decoration has also begun. Not to forget the Christmas carols chaperoning every walk
through shops …
Therefore let me end with a chearful: “Ho ho ho!”
