May Memoir: Ca va? Stories from Rural Life in Southern France, Chapter 12, Thanksgiving

Welcome to May MEMOIR!

Day 13

For the entire month of May, I'll be sharing part of each chapter from my memoir, Ca va?  Stories from Rural Life in Southern France.

I love Thanksgiving.  Perhaps it’s the dishes, the gravy soaked turkey, or just the green light to overindulge, but there is something about it that just makes me happy.  I also love introducing it to French people.  It’s a concept they have difficulty wrapping their heads around because it’s neither religious nor a wartime commemorative, like all of their holidays.  It’s also quite different from their traditional meals, so Christophe does his best to sneak in a French item or two to put our guests more at ease.  By the end of the meal, they get it, and often ask for a wheel barrel to help get them home.

Chapter 12: Thanksgiving

While I have changed my daily routine to fit into a new rhythm of life, one thing has not changed for me since moving here: Thanksgiving.  As I child, it was only a precursor to Christmas, but as an adult, it has become something much more.  The family rituals, traditional dishes, time spent with loved ones, the overeating: I have brought that all with me.  The problem is, I can’t find a whole turkey in November as, after all, Thanksgiving is not a French thing.

My first Thanksgiving with Christophe was not the dinner I had hoped it to be.  We searched in all the grocery stores around for a whole turkey.  None would be available until Christmas, unless we wanted to special order one at a greatly inflated price at a butcher, and we didn’t have that in our budget.  I settled for turkey scallops, which are very thinly sliced turkey breasts.  In France, I more often see scallops than the whole breast, and it seems the thinner they are sliced and the less meat there is, the more expensive they are; a concept that runs against everything American I have learned.

There was no televised football game, no morning parade, and no naps after dinner.  Instead, I picked up a few items that resembled the ingredients in the dishes I knew and we had dinner like always after Christophe got home from work.  Being a Thursday, he was particularly tired and was just looking forward to the weekend.  He tried, knowing this was something special to me, but the holiday was just not the same.  I vowed the next one would be different.

That December, when the turkeys were finally in stock at the grocery stores for Christmas, I bought a whole turkey and put in the freezer for next year.  I was going to have a real turkey with stuffing even if it took me 11 months of preparation.

The following November, I understood what was needed.  Thanksgiving was moved to Saturday to accommodate Christophe works’ schedule, and I persuaded myself that a game of football was not that important.  I had close to a year to familiarize myself with the French equivalent of the ingredients I needed and started to prepare my list.  This year was going to different, better, and more.  Initially, we invited Christophe’s family for dinner, but plans fell through at the last minute and they could not come.  I was disappointed with the news, and was sitting at the kitchen table trying to figure out my next step when someone knocked on the door.

It is Marie!  Our friends Marie and Philippe have a house in the village and decided to come down to Bainat.

“We had a week of vacation, so we decided to drive down last night”, she explains as she enters the kitchen.

“That’s great!  You can eat Thanksgiving with us!”

“Thanksgiving?”  She asks slowly pronouncing the “th”; a sound that does not exist in the French language.  “What is that?  I’ve never eaten that before.”

  “It’s not a recipe; it’s a holiday.  An American holiday and we have a special dinner for it.”