Pinoy Thanksgiving

While many American holidays are shared around the world (Christmas, New Years), there are of course many that are specific just to the U.S. So, growing up in the Philippines, Thanksgiving was always an interesting time of year. The Philippines doesn't celebrate Thanksgiving, but with a large missionary presence in the country and families who were trying to raise their kids in a different culture yet still maintaining their American heritage, everybody tried to celebrate Thanksgiving in some shape or form. Turkeys aren't real prevalent in the Philippines, so having turkey as the main course is rare and how can you celebrate Turkey Day without a turkey? There aren't cranberries either. Since it wasn't a national holiday, we always had school and a regular schedule on Thanksgiving Day. Actually, the years we were in boarding school, we didn't celebrate Thanksgiving with my parents.

Thanksgiving was a dorm celebration. You have to understand that the boarding school arrangements entailed us living in a rather large house with some 20 other boarding students, set up in a kind of family arrangement. There were us boarding students with a family who was responsible for our care and took care of planning the meals and planning the activities for us. They were responsible for disciplining us, things like that too, filling all of the parental roles. So, we had a family arrangement; it wasn't our own family, but it was out dorm family. When you put 20 guys in their preteens to teens, living under one roof, you go through a lot of food and we were on a modest budget. We weren't starving to death, but we also enjoyed eating. Thanksgiving Dinner was our annual Super Bowl of dining.

There's a whole preparation to this because you've got 20 kids whom you will be fighting with over food and you want to get the most food you can out of the meal. So, Thanksgiving turned out to be quite the event. As in any institutional mass food-producing context, we were constantly grumbling about the quality of the food and it was the brunt of many jokes as is college dorm food, as is school lunch food, you name it. Like it's football based cousin, the pre-feast preparation and hype starts to build in the week or two leading up to the feast with us kids employing different philosophies of getting our stomachs prepared to digest as much food as possible. Now you had a couple different pre-feast methodologies.

One, you had the groups that felt that getting yourself as hungry as possible was going to be the best method to consuming as much food as you could on Thanksgiving. So that would be the group that would gradually start reducing their intake the week before Thanksgiving Day, with the mindset that they would be so hungry come Thanksgiving Day that they could consume the most amount of turkey and everything else. I'll explain how we got turkeys in a minute. The second group felt that in order to consume the most of amount of food, their stomachs needed to be as large as possible, and so they would begin increasing the amount of food they were eating day to day with the thought that that would expand their stomachs and by Thanksgiving their stomachs would have expanded to a larger size capable of eating more food. Then you had the camp that just went about things as normal; they were no fun.

Thanksgiving day, again, would be a typical day. Go to school, no special day off or anything and get home, you'd have the meal with all 20 of us. The neat thing was the lengths to which the school and dorm parents would go to provide us with as traditional a Thanksgiving as possible. There were times where through connections with military personnel (our government taxes at work), we were able to get turkeys. At some point they did find a source for turkeys, though they were quite expensive and not in high abundance. I think we were able to have turkey just about every Thanksgiving. A lot of the sources would come through military connections with the air and naval bases in the Philippines or just spending extra to get the imported specialities for the Thanksgiving. As Abraham Lincoln had dreamed it would be, we'd all feast to our hearts content, bordering on gluttony and celebrate the holiday together. And of course, then, the next three days have turkey sandwiches for lunch and enjoy the best part: leftovers

But I think the most turkey-fun I've had in my lifetime was during college when I took a Butterball with me as one of my two pieces of luggage on a return trip to the Philippines. The best part was seeing the bird go through the x-ray machine.

Thanks to Charlene for enduring the challenge of transcribing this post through Windows Media Player.