Thanks in A Big World

Here in Canada, it is not Thanksgiving.  Thanksgiving occurred in September October, months ago, during the time when the sun came out with regularity and daylight savings time was still with us so that the night did not begin at 4 p.m.  Thanksgiving came when the stores had turkeys and fresh cranberries and tiny brussels sprouts.  And now it is November, and though the stores will again have turkeys a month from now, for now, it is roast chicken.  And, because it is just the two of us and we are leaving soon, it is a roasted frying chicken.  Is this humiliating, or is it not? 

The cranberries are the most puzzling part of all this.  Just south and east of Vancouver there are enormous cranberry bogs, but there are no fresh cranberries to be bought here in our market.  The produce man said to me that the store has them only in September, and after that they are all frozen.  In the freezer, was a bag of now-frozen, formerly fresh cranberries, whose brand was the American standard, Oceanspray.  But these Oceanspray cranberries come from south east of Vancouver.  And Oceanspray is headquartered in Lakeville, Massachusetts (a very small town, population: 10K now, but maybe 5K then) , where I lived from 1970-75.  Which maybe is why the absence of fresh cranberries looms large for me.

I endure; I endure this every year because we are always in the U.S. for Canadian Thanksgiving and in Canada for U.S. Thanksgiving.  But in Point Roberts, even though all the Canadian summer residents have cleared out by September, many come back, if the weather is nice, for their Canadian Thanksgiving.  And the International Market always drums up some turkeys for them to buy and roast.

In September, I was in the market at Point Roberts and got to talking with the guy in line ahead of me who was buying a turkey, presumably because of its being almost Canadian Thanksgiving.  He told me that his daughter was travelling in Europe this year, was at the moment in Holland.  She had told him that there was no turkey to be found in Holland, or at least not at any price that she could afford.  So he was buying this turkey now to freeze for her when she returned in a month or so, and then their Canadian Thanksgiving would, like ours, be held a little too close to Christmas.

This is what it is like living internationally.  I would always have thought that a turkey could be obtained any time, any place, if only a frozen one.  But not so.  Here in foreign Canada, as in foreign Holland and foreign France, there are no turkeys easily to be found in November.  Other things, also, I suppose.  The Australians who come here will find no vegamite on every market shelf; the Norwegians will find SkiQueen gyetost a specialty commodity, not to be found at just any cheese shop or counter.  The French will not find either the Americans or the Western Canadians (who knows about Quebec?) celebrating Bastille Day.  We are all different.  Disney was wrong: it’s a big world, after all.

Here's to You

The little bird's in the oven; looks like it will be okay. The apple pie, complete with carmels cooked in with the apples, is on the sideboard; everything else is set to go, including the table and the fire in the fireplace. A busy day, a kind evening ahead. To all those who are celebrating Thanksgiving today, our best wishes. And to those of you who aren't, our best wishes.

A Holiday Abroad

Fast approaching the National Day of Thanksgiving, although it’s a little hard to be thankful for the financial news in the past 2.5 months. But, of course, there are many other things to be thankful for, and I'd like to insist upon our general thankfulness. Very grateful, and all that.

We have, in fact, sort of missed Thanksgiving for the past decade or so. Because of the way our schedule works, we are normally in the U.S. at the time of Canadian Thanksgiving and in Canada at the time of U.S. Thanksgiving, so it has been easy enough just to pass on both and to eat grilled cheese sandwiches and vegetable soup on those occasions, and be thankful enough for them and for one another. Our children all live far away from us and from one another so for the most part, they do a traditional thanksgiving in an untraditional manner: none of this ‘home for the holidays.’ Maybe all for the best considering the way in which these occasions are alleged to be a source of great stress.

However, however, last month, for unknown reasons, Ed said, ‘Why don’t we have a regular Thanksgiving dinner this year, even though we’re in B.C. And invite the neighbors.’ Presumably he mentioned this to me before noon and I said, ‘Sure, sure, whatever you say, dear.’ Later in the day, I might have at least thought about it. But there we were. He invited the neighbors, they accepted, and I put this anticipated event on the schedule and in the back of my mind.

However, however, it is now in the front of my mind. The very front. Yesterday, I betook myself to the grocery store to acquire a turkey and assorted Thanksgiving Stuff. I assumed there would be a turkey because there are a lot of Americans up here and the grocery is doubtless willing to accommodate their needs. However, after walking back and forth along the meat counter about eight times, I finally located the one and only Thanksgiving Turkey: about 14 pounds and $45.00. Even Canadian, that’s a lot to pay for a turkey I don’t particularly long for. And I doubt if the neighbors were longing either, since they’d had their own turkey just a month ago. I contemplated the turkey; I tried to admire the turkey; I lifted the turkey in my two hands to see if it felt like a $45 purchase. It really didn’t. So I put it back and thought, ‘Lasagna?’

No, you can’t have lasagna for Thanksgiving dinner; we have had it, as well as chile, for Christmas, but not for Thanksgiving. For Thanksgiving, it is a turkey, alas. Or maybe a …chicken? A nice, big, roasting chicken that I can pretend is a small turkey, if only to myself? An organic-y chicken (not really, because the closest this market comes to organic chickens are those referred to as ‘antibiotic-free specialty chickens’, whatever specialty may mean). There were a bunch of those. I took the biggest one, a little over five pounds, and only $16. (My younger daughter reports that their entire turkey cost only $16.)

So there we are. There will be only a small amount of stuffing, of course, but there will be no mashed potatoes because the chicken does not give good enough gravy (in my view) to justify mashed potatoes. I am asking Ed to roast a big pan of root vegetables, including russets and sweet potatoes, parsnips, rhutabaga, carrots, and onions, and today I made a large quantity of pickled beets for salad. They had no fresh cranberries at the grocery, either, but I still had a bag of them in the freezer from last Christmas, and they will do. A friend has recently given me a bunch of leeks, so we’ll start it all off with vichysoisse, and we’ll end it with apple pie and whipped cream. I think Squanto would be happy to attend. And I think that next year, I’ll go with something more traditional: grilled cheese sandwiches and vegetable soup, and very thankful for both.

Harvesting

Yesterday was devoted to cleaning up the almost-end of the apple harvest: making and freezing applesauce, making yet one more apple pie from our own apples. I’ve finally decided that an apple pie with only a top crust is just as good as (and maybe better than in some ways) an apple pie with two crusts. First, the bottom crust doesn’t get soggy if the apples are very moist; second, you don’t have to make two crusts; third, you cut the fat portion of the crust in half. Of course, I make up for that with having whipped cream with the apple one-crust pie, but whipped cream (like chocolates) is one of life’s small necessities. Or at least can be considered so if one is willing to use it in moderation.

I am still among the cooks that whip cream themselves because the stuff that comes in cans tastes funny to me. I used to think that people bought the canned stuff because they didn’t want to be committed to using an entire cup of whipping cream. But that can’t be the case because an entire can of pre-whipped cream (I know, it’s not really pre-whipped but is 'whipped' in the process of extruding it) also would have to be a commitment to the whole thing. I can only conclude that it is a trade-off: higher price and less good taste in exchange for not putting the 4 minutes into whipping it yourself. Seems like a bad bargain to me.

But, I was not meaning to talk about whipped cream. It was about the apples. There have been a lot of them, although not as abundant a year as most. My friends who press apple juice each fall usually have boxes of apples all over the cool parts of their house—brought in by friends and neighbors with excess—but the other day, I saw only a half dozen boxes at their house. So, less juice this year, maybe. Our Jonagold harvest has been the best of our 6 or 7 varieties this year: exquisite taste, juicy, crisp. I try to save them for eating, but we are now down to the last ten or so, so we will, sadly, soon have to shift to grocery store apples for eating. Within the next 6 weeks they start becoming noticeably stored apples. One of our trees has a few red delicious still considering ripening. The fall raspberry crop is also still thinking about ripening (no chance), but is settling for molding on the canes; the last red delicious will probably make it.) We’re all pretty conscientious about using up these apples. My neighbors, going away for a week or so, called us from the ferry to urge us to pick the end of the harvest from their tree while they are gone if we need apples. The apple harvest lasts for two months, at least, and it may be my favorite time of year just because it goes on and on and because apples are so shareable.

It is also time for the pecan harvest in New Mexico where my older daughter lives. She has a highly productive pecan tree and each year she ships us a couple of boxes, about twenty pounds each, of pecans in the shell. The first year she sent them, she also sent a pecan nutcracker of great ingenuity, called an ‘inertia nutcracker.’ It is sort of like a small log splitter, but only a picture will do, so you can see one here. (I am particularly fond of the fact that they advertise it as having been ‘invented by a medical doctor.’ Is that what they do in their spare time?) The inertia nutcracker, I believe, works only with pecans, but it really works. Even 80 pounds later, I still find the process entertaining. A truly fresh pecan is a wonder indeed; a fresh, toasted pecan even more splendid

When I get these boxes of pecans, I crack and use some and freeze the rest in the shell. Then, I take them out over the following year as I need them. Having twenty-thirty pounds of shelled pecans is one of life’s great riches, and when you combine it with those fresh apples? Why so much inclination to complain about life’s inadequacies? Today, I cracked the last of last year’s pecans because this year’s will soon be upon us. (At least I hope so.) I think of this as a day of thanksgiving: for the apples and the pecans. The Pilgrims landed in the wrong part of the country perhaps. Pecan pie: so much more everything than pumpkin could ever even dream of.

Thanks, Here and There

Last week was Canada’s Thanksgiving; next month is the U.S. Thanksgiving. Same holiday, different countries? If so, why six weeks apart? Perhaps it is the case that whatever country you are born/raised in, that country’s customs, holidays, ways of being are incorporated as originals with every other country being considered somewhat derivative. Or perhaps U.S. citizens are particularly prone to this me-first-ism. Either explanation seems viable to me. In any case, when I moved to the Northwest and began to move back and forth between Canada and the U.S., I just assumed that the Canadians must have picked up Thanksgiving from us, but had decided to move it to a different time to differentiate their experience of it from ours. The different date, however, constantly eludes me. I can never remember exactly which month it is in (September? October?) or when in the month it occurs. It’s not at the end of November is all I know.

This year, toward the end of September, our neighbors invited us to their Thanksgiving dinner and I was happy to accept the invitation, except that I somehow assumed that it would be toward the end of October and not toward the beginning of October. I mean, how can I be expected to remember not only that it isn’t in November but that it also isn’t toward the end of the month? As a result, I was left making sorry excuses and apologies when, shortly before the 13th, it came to my attention that Canadian Thanksgiving was quickly approaching and we were residing in the wrong country to be dropping over for dinner.

This kind of thing happens to me not infrequently. This results from coming to a second country late in life. You’ve already gone way past the time and place where you are supposed to learn all the important cultural knowledge and any further learning is likely to be embarrassing because you don’t actually know what you don’t know and you just stumble into it. For example, I knew that Canadians celebrate Victoria Day, and also that they celebrate Canada Day and B.C. Day. I understood that Canada Day was sort of like the U.S. July 4th. But we don’t have anything like B.C. Day, so there was no parallel for it or Victoria Day. However, I jumped to the conclusion that because B.C. Day was a celebration of the Province’s coming into being, Victoria Day must be a celebration of the Province’s Capital’s (Victoria) coming into being. I couldn’t have been more surprised to discover that it was about Queen Victoria’s birthday. I imagine every B.C. schoolchild knows that, but I wasn’t here at the right time to learn it.

Month in, month out, I find myself astonished to find yet something else I have been confused about. It’s a humbling experience when repeated so frequently. And as for Thanksgiving? Well, the first Canadian Thanksgiving was celebrated in 1578 by English explorer Martin Frobisher, whereas the Pilgrims weren’t even thinking about getting to the New World at that time, let alone making friends with Squanto and the fish and corn thing and all that; not until 1620 could they put in their claim. So the Canadians didn’t exactly ‘get it from us.’ The U.S. government frequently declared ‘Days of Thanksgiving’ and individual states also did this periodically, but it wasn’t until 1863 that Thanksgiving, the last Thursday in November, became a statutory holiday for all states.

Canada, too, had Thanksgiving Days periodically declared for many years, but after World War I, Canada amalgamated Armistice Day and Thanksgiving, only separating them in 1931. Not until 1957, however, was Thanksgiving moved to the 2nd Monday in October. Interestingly, it is not a statutory holiday in Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick. If I had lived here all my life, I’d probably know all that without having to look it up. Without engaging in research, however, I can say with absolute confidence that we both do turkey and football for Thanksgiving.