Thanksgiving, spaceship shaped cookies and an existential crisis...

It’s just started snowing here. And by snowing, I mean we’ve had as much snow as the UK gets in a year in about four hours. Getting to class tomorrow could be fun…

Anyways, last week was one of the most important event s of the American calendar, Thanksgiving.  The origins of thanksgiving are a mix of traditions, but for the most part it’s a celebration of when the Pilgrims landed in America and celebrated their harvest festival, which they combined with that of the Native Americans, to thank God for guiding them safely across the Atlantic. This event was pretty much the start of the true colonisation of North America by Europeans.  It became a proper national holiday in the American Civil War.

Of course, the colonisation of the US also led to the near extinction of the Native Americans, which is why my suitemate refers to it as Genocide Day…but in the interest of being nice I’ll brush over that for now!

Nowadays it’s a four day holiday from Thursday (Thanksgiving Day itself) to Sunday. Many students here decided to in fact make it a five day holiday, so my classes on Wednesday were strangely empty. My geology professor decided that those who turned up would get to write two of the question for the final exam, so it was worth getting up for.

Then on Wednesday evening I left the empty halls and went to stay with Allegra, one of my friends from church and her family. Allegra and another of my friends, Dan, have, for some reason, decided that they are my divorced parents fighting for custody over me, so are sharing me in the various holidays. Slightly worrying, but at least I have places to stay…

Thursday morning started with a parade in Detroit (we watched it on tv), which shared the usual American attribute of being huge and over the top, with vast, very well built floats.  Next came the Thanksgiving football game. There are two of these, which always involve the Detroit Lions and the Dallas Cowboys against someone. Apparently the Lions always loose, which they did again this year. Still not sure if I like American football or not.         

The main event of Thanksgiving is of course food on Thursday evening, for which turkey is eaten. Surprisingly the traditional Christmas meal is, like ours, also turkey, so they have turkey sandwiches for two months in a row instead of our one… anyway it was a very nice meal. There were quite a few people there, as an important part of thanksgiving is that it’s a family celebration. Many people take the day off and travel to be with their families, which can be quite a way with a country the size of the US! This can of course lead to travel chaos, but it seems to have been ok this year.

I think by far the question was asked the most was “do you have a thanksgiving?” On first view an odd question, but the celebration has moved on from its historical origins. I’ve been asked quite a lot of questions like this about how Britain views or knows about various American traditions. I’m still waiting for “Do you celebrate Independence Day?” But no we don’t have a thanksgiving, on account of being a proper old country rather than a colony with ideas above its station (I didn’t say that).

After the meal I went to investigate another bit of American culture, the infamous Black Friday.  Yes you’ve read that right, it’s still Thursday.

Black Friday is the first day of the Christmas shopping season, and many shops put on very good deals on electronics, clothing, toys and other stuff. People (I am not making this stuff up) regularly camp for day or days to be the first in the doors to get all of the on-offer stuff before they sell out. Shops have opened at four am before, and this year it got even worse, with many places opening at midnight and some, including Wal-Mart, opening at ten on Thursday evening.  It was decided I needed to experience this, so off we went to have a look.  

It was an interesting experience. Consumerism distilled was how I would describe it. Locusts were the metaphor someone else used. I think he may have been closer to the truth- no sooner would a trolley of stuff on offer be wheeled out than a horde of shoppers would descend on it, stripping it bare in under a minute. Unfortunately the Lego wasn’t on offer so I came away empty handed.

So waking up quite late the next day we started making cookies, leading to various arguments about the need for precision in measuring ingredients. (I’m sure the “some” is a perfectly acceptable unit of measurement, as in “add some flour, some sugar, etc.) It was then that I was made to feel old.

Plans to watch the new dvd Allegra had bought were stymied when we discovered that one of the  (twenty million) film channels was showing all three The Lord of the Rings films back to back.  The reason? It was ten years last weekend since the first one was released. That’s really scary. Something that had a fairly big impact on my life was ten years ago. Oo er…

We resisted watching them all, Allegra’s dad and I gamely staying up until the end of The Two Towers at two am, but fortunately they were repeated all weekend so we just watched The Return of the King that evening. Ten hours well spent.  

On Sunday we went to the oldest Methodist Church in continuous use in Michigan, a title that the quality of the service unfortunately didn’t live up to. Fortunately Allegra’s family agreed with me that it had been a fairly rubbish service.  I was volunteered to read something about the advent colours, for which I got nice comments about how good a speaker I am. Those comments do slightly worry me though- were you listening to what I was actually saying?   

That afternoon “dad” (Dan) turned up to help us frost the cookies. This was taken rather less seriously by two of us, leading to very large number of green snowmen with orange spots, a farmyard scene on a star, and my epic discovery that if you turned a Santa-shaped cookie on it’s side it looked like Serenity.  

After that we came back to MSU, stopping on the way to go to a Taco Bell, which I was assured was another essential American experience. In my, er, experience people only use the words “essential experience” to describe something when there’s nothing better to say about it…

So that was thanksgiving. The snow is now slowly climbing up the walls. Goodbye…