Defending Thanksgiving

Our last experience of Thanksgiving overseas was a rather miserable Thanksgiving buffet at Marie Callendar's in Mexico City. The food was pretty good and the company was amiable, but overall I found the experience of eating in a restaurant with a group of acquaintances united mostly by our lack of other plans to be thoroughly depressing. Those of you living near family are so lucky to know that you will have a place to go for the holidays. In any case, we were determined not to have a repeat of that experience this year. Not knowing what others' plans were for the holiday, we decided the only way to make sure we had a nice Thanksgiving was to organize it ourselves. So we did. It went well, but not without some serious hard work defending the holiday from several threats:

1. Football--An extremely nice and helpful new family heard our plan to play board games after the meal and kindly offered to bring a tape of a football game that someone had recently mailed them. This was really nice and very well-intentioned, but they seemed rather shocked when I explained that we were football-free by choice. In the end, everyone had a great time chatting and we never played board games. But thank goodness we didn't have to talk over the noise of a football game.

2. The Plague--OK, so maybe it wasn't the plague exactly, but some sort of stomach bug has been going around the embassy recently. When the family that said they would co-host the event with us got sick and said they couldn't make it, we were worried. But when they insisted on sending over the desserts and turkey they had made anyway, we got really worried. I imagined 30 people getting sick after dinner at my house and Ben and Ellie battling the dehydration and other side effects of gastrointestinal illnesses that can be serious in little ones. Much debate followed about the infectiousness of this illness. Was it a bacteria or a virus? Could a virus spread on food, or did it need a live host? Hadn't the colonists killed the Indians with small pox-infected blankets? In the end, it took a lot of persistence, tact, and a call to the local clinic, but eventually I ascertained that the desserts had been baked before anyone got sick and were probably OK, and I convinced them to let us bring the defrosted turkey to our place to cook here so that they wouldn't be handling cooked food. Three days later, no reports of illness.

3. Too many people--When we were thinking about who to invite, we started with our closest friends here in Cambodia, and then added other people who were nice and who we thought were at risk of having a depressing Thanksgiving--either because they were new or single. We ended up with a long list, but figured we could invite them anyway because surely many of them would have other plans.

Then people kept saying yes. And other people kept asking if we could invite other folks who wouldn't have a place to go for Thanksgiving. And then one person apologized for having already invited some folks who wouldn't have a place to go. And so somehow our already somewhat overwhelming invite list ballooned further to 35 adults and 11 kids. How were we going to pull this off?

Fortunately, then people started to say no. And then lots of people cancelled at the last minute. We lost 6 people to "the plague", one to work, and one to a boss' Thanksgiving party that ran late. And, in the winner of the "lame excuse" category, lost one to someone who got so tuckered out golfing that he fell asleep and missed our Thanksgiving party...all five hours of it...without calling to let us know. So then we ended up with 22 people, which was just about right. Still a little bit big, but everyone had a terrific time, and so many people told us how glad they were that we invited them and how long it had been since they had a real Thanksgiving dinner with a family. And, in the end, I'm sure we could have squeezed in a few more.