I was talking to my mom the other day and telling her about our Thanksgiving here, and she mentioned “wouldn’t that be a nice thing to put on your web-site thingee?” And I agreed. So here you go.
The Election
We voted from over here, of course. It’s not like our two votes were going to change the results in California, but we did our duty, regardless. And, gentle reader, you may already know how this turned out.
It went very, very badly.
@snipe and I were absolutely cratered. It was an utterly horrible result. I used to joke, “Hey, if Harris wins, then great! And if that fucking guy wins, well, glad we’re here.” That joke doesn’t feel funny anymore. I should’ve learned my lesson the last time “that fucking guy” was running, and our AirBnB hosts in Amsterdam told us, “don’t worry, if he wins, we will adopt you!” Which was funny at the time, but it didn’t feel that way the next day. So I think I’ve learned to not make those jokes anymore.
Pretty much the entire company was pretty flattened as well – everyone was more than just “seriously bummed out” – they seem depressed, and distressed. It was an awful time.
And we have a pair of friends here who are very smart (honestly, all of our friends here are very smart; it’s refreshing) who we often talk politics with. We also get to learn about how Portuguese politics work. And they know our leanings, so they reached out soon after the election. Actually, a few of our groups of friends did, which was nice. I don’t think we were very good at answering very well, because we were pretty much a mess.
But this first group who reached out, they knew exactly how much we were hurting. At certain points they’d send a voice memo – normally the bane of our existences. And we’d hear it and it would just be the audio of a cat purring. It was enormously sweet, just sending us something that would be calming and warm. It helped.
They finally asked us – do you want to come over, and just, like play Mario Party and hang out? We finally had to answer, “uh, maybe – can we just pencil that in? We don’t know how we’re going to feel.”
Well, Friday rolls around, and we decide that we’re up for it, if only just. So we go over and hang out and have a great time – just eating pizza and drinking wine and chatting – very much not about the election. It was really recharging after feeling so defeated. We ended up staying there until 4am!
In the conversations we had we mentioned that Thanksgiving was a week away and we do have some Thanksgiving materials here – if so, would they be interested in coming? And before we could even finish the sentence, they said “yes.”
Now, note, these folks are a Russian gal and a Portuguese guy – all they know about for Thanksgiving is what they see in movies. So they have no idea what they’re in for.
Alison’s note: Brady missed the best part. Our friends were naive enough to tell us that they knew nothing about Thanksgiving customs, so whatever we told them, they would believe. Friends, we had all manner of ridiculous “customs” made up for them. “Why, yes, on this sacred day of Thanksgiving, all guests must arrive with underwear on their heads and do exactly three cartwheels – apartment space allowing – as you enter the host’s house. You must then spin around three times and say ‘yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker’ and make fists your feet” and they – maybe – would have believed it.)
Thanksgiving
They reached out a few days before Turkey Day, and asked, “what’s the deal, we still doing this?” And honestly we didn’t know if we were going to do it, but we decided to go for it. We invited a few other friends but with the short notice, only one other friend was able to make it – but she was going to bring her new boyfriend. So we had a total of 6 people! (Spoiler alert: the new boyfriend turned out great!)
Now, it is possible to get a whole turkey here – but it’s a special order from a butcher (talho), not something you can just randomly pick up at a supermarket. But to do that you need some planning in advance. And we were definitely not planning in advance.
But you definitely can get potatoes here, and we had already had some Mac & Cheese and Stovetop stuffing our amazing friends back in the states had shipped in. So we have tons of the stuff. And, hey, the sides are the most important thing, right?
So we decided to make our sides, and order in some chicken from one of our favorite restaurants here, Bonjardim (some of the best rotisserie chicken you will ever eat). That’s close enough to turkey, right?!
While Alison was tending to making the mashed potatoes – which were excellent – I was giving people the grand tour of the new house, and making sure people had drinks, and hosting. I had to be really ‘on’ and it was fun for me to be the center of attention. We switched roles when I got to make the stuffing and the Mac & Cheese, and the gravy.
I figured I would make gravy, so I took what drippings from the chicken I could and thickened it up with flour (I couldn’t find cornstarch, though one of our guests told us later that you can get it here). It tasted great, but it was a weird gray color. Oh well.
One of our guests brought a delicious desert – this amazing home-made Japanese poundcake, with this weird candied egg yolk fibers (fios de ovos) as a topping. It was delicious!
We had all kinds of nice appetizers – cheese and olives and crackers and you name it.
Plenty of drinks were on hand – after me making around 4 trips to the supermarket (no car, but supermarket is 4 minutes walk away). My mom asked, “Oh, the supermarket must have been awful!” And, no, it was fine. It was just a regular Thursday here, of course.
It was wonderful!
We got to explain Thanksgiving – which sounds pretty wholesome when you skip the whole “…and then we murdered all of the native Americans” part. But we left that in for the appropriate context.
As always happens in Thanksgiving, we hosts were pretty much starving by the end of it all. Which is expected – we made sure to eat very well beforehand.
I remember us being out of utensils at one point and I had to eat mashed potatoes off of a knife. I felt like a drug dealer from an 80’s movie sampling a kilo with a switchblade saying, “mmm…pure.”
Our guests were lovely and tolerated our insufferable “and what are you thankful for” routine. Alison and I actually did do it, and we were cornily sincere, and it felt good. They were better guests than we were hosts – they even made coffees for everyone near the end, and helped clean up!
Being able to share this one bit of Americana that I do genuinely enjoy with my new friends here felt just amazing. I’m so glad we did it. It didn’t wipe out the awfulness of the election (reading the news every day pretty much prevents that from happening), but it strangely made me feel more centered here, even as I’m sharing traditions from over there.
