It’s officially after Halloween, and if department stores can display their Christmas apparel, I’m free to talk about Thanksgiving. For many individuals, Thanksgiving is a time for family, turkey, and tradition. However, in my household, things are a little different.
For starters, I don’t have any extended family close by. Most of my relatives are back in India, where Thanksgiving isn’t even a concept to begin with. My relatives that do live in the States are too far away for a comfortable visit. Thanksgivings are usually spent with my mother, father, younger sister, and my three pets. No raucous family gatherings for us. When I was younger I used to feel jealous of my friends with large families, the ones that threw huge dinners year after year. But I find that I’ve grown accustomed to Thanksgiving as a quieter holiday, a time to give thanks with my best friends in the world – my immediate family. Besides, fewer people means more food to go around!
Speaking of food, our Thanksgivings are equally nontraditional in the foods we serve. None of us like typical Thanksgiving food. We abhor casseroles, turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, gravy, etc. Nothing against the traditional fare – it’s just not our taste. Instead, we have our own little tradition, which we started four years ago after years of uneventful, haphazard Thanksgivings.
Each of us – my mother, father, sister, and I – make a dish from a different continent. We do our best to cover all the major courses, and in the end we have a spread of six dishes from each of the six inhabited continents. (Sorry Antarctica! We put ice in our drinks, does that count?) Â
The results of one such year can be seen below:Â
A Praseed Thanksgiving, complete with shrimp soup, spaghetti with mussels and clams, Egyptian rice and lentils, green tea cake, and pumpkin pie. Yes, we bought the pumpkin pie.
Sometimes certain dishes turn out better than others. Our first international Thanksgiving didn’t offer much in the dessert department as someone (I won’t name names) left the Australian Pavlovas in the oven too long, creating rocks out of what should have been a light meringue-like dessert. One year, my father made an African curry so spicy we were left fighting over glasses of milk (and we’re fairly accustomed to spicy food). But overall, most of the dishes have been successful. Â
What these dinners do is bring our family together. Even though I’ve been at college for the last couple of years, the tradition is still going strong. In fact, I look forward to the afternoon of cooking together, of dancing to music my father plays in the kitchen, of telling each other funny anecdotes and asking deep philosophical questions (many of which go unanswered). Overall, even if I was offered the giant, turkey-laden Thanksgiving I always wondered about as a child, I wouldn’t trade the Praseed family tradition for anything in the world.
My father, sister, and I about two Thanksgivings ago. I’m rockin’ the bedhead.
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