Happy Thanksgiving, y’all! Oddly enough, the British generally don’t celebrate the Pilgrim’s success in the New World, and nobody in Oxford really wants to cook me turkey. So Sunday I hopped on a train to Birmingham, one of England’s biggest shopping cities, to visit some American study abroad friends.
We did Thanksgiving “Felicity” style in the University of Birmingham dorms.
The plan was for eight American study abroad kids to have a nice homey dinner together, but word got around, and soon an excess of 40 non-Americans got invited to our holiday shindig. Knowing that 50 students could not fit into a dorm kitchen, we planned two dinners, one for the homesick Americans and an odd Brit or two at 2 p.m. and one for everybody else at 5 p.m.
Being in the U.K., we had to improvise on some of the food. Duncan, an odd British kid who used to be in a circus, accidentally bought a couple of chickens instead of turkey, but we had a backup turkey just in case.
Instead of French fried onion on green bean casserole, we used sour cream and onion potato chips. But all in all, we did pretty well for a bunch of unsupervised college kids. It also helped that everyone who cooked majored in food, hospitality and tourism.
After five hours of kitchen labor, we gathered around to enjoy our first Thanksgiving in England. We finished in about 20 minutes. Then everybody went to the kitchen downstairs to prepare for Dinner #2.
Downstairs, the room was decorated in a birthday-esque fashion, with ballons, streamers and “Happy Thanksgiving!” written in party cup bubble letters. We all put on our Thanksgiving pants and brought down leftover stuffing and dill potatoes from our meal three hours ago. This dinner wasn’t authentic, but still quite festive, as many of the international students from India and Spain brought traditional Indian and Spanish food.
God bless curry and tortillas!
We managed to keep a few traditions this fake Thanksgiving. The most important being the “Say What You’re Thankful For” game. Californian Tyler was thankful that “the Pilgrims were religiously persecuted and left this cold, cold (expletive-ing) country and came to America.”
After stuffing myself silly, I fell into the traditional food coma. The next morning I ate a turkey sandwich for breakfast, complete with a moist-maker, the gravy-soaked piece of bread in the middle. And because no Thanksgiving is complete without a little day-after shopping, I threw myself in The Bullring, the largest mall in all of England. I weaved my way through the dense crowds, stood in a queue for the escalators and two hours later, emerged with a pack of Christmas cards.
This year I’m thankful that Christmas season starts super early here, as there is no holiday in between Halloween and Christmas and I can get a head start on listening to Wham!’s “Last Christmas.”