Do They Know It's Thanksgiving?

Thanksgiving in Austria was interesting.

As you probably guessed, they don't celebrate it here. And they don't really understand it. You eat lots of food? You give thanks for things? You wear elastic-waist pants to the dinner table? You take a nap after doing the dishes? (OK, so the last two things are particular to the Feitl family, but still inexplicable to all of Austria)

In two of my classes we had Thanksgiving breakfasts (each class has a yearly breakfast and because it was the end of November they decided to have a Thanksgiving theme). I explained all the different Thanksgiving foods and how to prepare them to the kids, and they all signed up to bring different things.


Both breakfasts turned out really well. Students in both classes managed to find cranberries (they don't really eat them over here) and made cranberry sauce. We had assorted vegetables at both breakfasts and lots of delicious desserts. The teacher for both classes had the students name some things that they're thankful for, and I got to sit and just chat with them for a while. The students of 3b are 10 and 11 years old and absolutely adorable. The entire class is in the first picture, and the boy sitting next to me in the second picture is also from this class. The students of the other class, 5a, are 12 or 13 years old and past the cute stage but are great.

And now for the things they just didn't understand. My beloved American holiday turned out to have plenty of Austrian flair. I had explained sweet potatoes in detail to the students (long, orange potatoes that taste sweet), but at breakfast with 3b the sweet potatoes were regular white potatoes with sugar (in the first picture next to the dish with the lemon slices). I also explained that pumpkin pie was a dessert (they use pumpkin almost exclusively for savory things), but one of the pumpkin pies looked and tasted suspiciously like carrot cake with lemon icing (behind the "sweet potatoes" in the picture). In the breakfast with class 5a we didn't have roasted turkey, but turkey schnitzel (which the boys are eating in the last picture). They were all so proud of the things that they had brought in that I didn't have the heart to tell them that some of them were so very wrong.

So although the breakfasts were really fun, afterwards I still had a sweet potato-shaped hole in my heart. To fill this hole American roommate Zach and I made Thanksgiving dinner for Italian roommate Laura and Latvian roommate Yasha. I did the sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, and stuffing, and made a failed attempt at gravy, and Zach did the turkey and vegetables. We used the turkey paper plates and napkins that Mommy mailed over, although it took a while to convince Yasha and Laura that it was okay to throw them away after using them (they're always curiously hesitant to believe that disposable products should be disposed of). Afterwards I did three of my favorite things: changed into pajama pants, video chatted with my family, and went to sleep.
And that's how I celebrated Thanksgiving in this mysterious land of schnitzel and sugared potatoes.