Thanksgiving in Sweden

Sweden doesn't have Thanksgiving. Seeing as I went to a school made up primarily of Americans and Canadians, though, we had one. It was called Hostfest (with two dots over the 'o'), and ordinarily falls between the Canadian and American Thanksgivings, but my year there it ended up being on the American Thanksgiving (ha!).

It was a big to-do. We could tell because we had real napkins. Normally we just had that brown gas station bathroom paper towel. But for this, we had real red paper napkins. I kept mine. It's in my scrapbook.

We all sat in the main dining room, with our family groups. Each family group also had a family from the community sit with them, as a thank you for their support. We had the local pastor's family with us. It was all very cozy feeling, very homey. (Except for the fact that the turkeys all had huge sparkler things shooting out of them. We've never had that in my family.) One of the guys from our group was very excited to get to carve the turkey (I mean, come on, he was 19 -this was a very grown-up thing to do!).

I got to do the dishes that night. I felt like I was missing out on all the fun after dinner, but I suppose I was making memories in the kitchen as we kept screaming at the potato bowls when they kept coming out of the dish machine dirty. Eventually we got them done, and got to go enjoy the rest of our evening.

The next day we had the leftovers. Of all things, that was the meal that tasted most like home. I think we enjoyed those even more than the actual meal the night before.

I was very thankful for Thanksgiving that year.