Thanksgiving is not a holiday in France. But we still usually celebrate it. Since Philip is working and some of the kids are in school on Thursday, we usually wait until Sunday. I might be tempted to skip all the work, but the children won't let us. They obviously enjoy eating the traditional Thanksgiving meal more than I enjoy making it! But before judging me too harshly on my laziness, realize that making a Thanksgiving meal here, means making most things from scratch! This includes cutting up the pumpkin and boiling it, before I can make a pumpkin pie. It also means making cream of mushroom soup if we want a green bean casserole. That's right, no canned soup in France, and no canned pumpkin! And NO canned cranberry sauce either! But we are lucky to live on the Belgian border where we can purchase Ocean Spray fresh canberries.
We tried to order a turkey from the butcher one year, but ended up with two 7 pounders instead of the 15 pounder I ordered. Just NOT the same thing! (At Christmas, it is EASY to buy a big turkey!) So we found the answer. We raise our own now. This is trickier than it sounds. We have never succeeded in getting a turkey to set on her eggs. So we buy baby turkeys. But turkey babies are very delicate, and die easily. Especially if they get wet. And turkeys are too stupid to stay out of the rain of their own free will. But we have gotten pretty good at it, and usually have 2 or 3 that survive til Thanksgiving.
Here is this year's lucky bird.
One of our guests (a fellow student of Mélanie's from Morocco) asked to come a day early and help us.
And here is our 22-pound turkey!!!
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