How was your Thanksgiving Day meal?

[Grumpier Than Thou]

I just ate. Absolutely delicious. The turkey was phenomenal, the biscuits were perfect, the potatoes were out of this world, what can I say? Time for the food coma to set in.

Of course there wouldn't be any mention of pumpkin pie. Thread boycott.

I hadn't had the pumpkin pie yet

[Ban my account ffs!]

I'd recommend the following recipe:

Corn Pudding

1 stick butter, softened
1/2 cup sugar

Cream butter and sugar until "fluffy"

Add 2 eggs, 1 at a time, cream thoroughly

Add one box Jiffy Cornbread mix, mixing until combined

Add one cup sour cream

1/2 cup milk

1 can regular corn, drained

1 can cream-style corn

Stir until combined

Bake in a buttered casserole dish until set (about 1 hour 20 minutes at 350F).

It's basically like sweeter, super moist corn bread and it goes extremely well with turkey and everything else.

[politicallefty]

I definitely enjoyed the meal. The turkey was excellent. Unfortunately, that was pretty much the extent of my enjoyment this Thanksgiving.

[angus]

It's so weird to see all these foreigners posting about Thanksgiving dinner.  I'll tell you a true story.  I'm sure I've already mentioned about how my mother and I didn't like turkey, so after my father died when I was in the eighth grade, we started to have lasagna for our Thanksgiving dinner, yada, yada, yada.  My father liked turkey so much...

I went to 13 schools from K through 12th grade.  That's an average of one per year.  It's not as though we moved every year, but it averaged one per year.  It wasn't because his company kept sending him places afar--there was that too--but it was mostly because, I suppose, he was pretty good at his job and he kept getting better offers, so he worked for many different companies while I was growing up, and we kept moving because of that.  Mostly it was in the United States, but from time to time we had to live in some other places.  In the second grade, I went to school in West Germany, back when there was a West Germany.  There came, on the last Thursday in the month of November of my seventh year, a Thanksgiving Day.  By then, I had already been schooled in the fact that West Germans don't "celebrate Halloween" the way we do, and little Frankie and Jürgen, across the street--Frankie was my age and Jürgen was my brother's--dressed like ghosts and were taught how to say "trick or treat" with an American accent and we went to the "American" neighborhood, a U.S. Army installation on the other side of town--oh, I could go on for days about those arrogant bastards whose parents worked for the government and who, in the second grade, thought they were better than I was because their fathers were corporals in Uncle Sam's Army and my father was an engineer and I went to "german" schools and shopped at "german" stores because we somehow weren't as "american" as them, but that's probably another thread--anyway, we discovered an "American" part of town and did our trick-or-treating there...  Then came Thanksgiving.

Apparently turkey is hard to come by in West Germany.  At least in November of 1974 it was hard to come by in West Germany.  But my father wanted Turkey for his thanksgiving dinner.  He also wanted to impress the other Americans, and the Brits, and the Greeks, and the Germans, and, yes, the Turks, who worked with him--we always had a very multinational crowd in my parents' cocktail parties during those years--with the Big American Turkey Dinner.  Somehow, my parents learned that turkey was available in Amsterdam.  So the four of us, my parents and two children, piled into the mercedes and drove across the border.  Now, you have to remember that the border between Germany and Netherlands, back then, was manned, and guarded.  Not like it is now.  In 2003 I happened to travel across that same border, and I noticed that now it is like passing from Ohio into Indiana or something.  Just a sign saying, "howdy, welcome to Netherlands, the Buckeye State" or something like that.  But back in 1974 it was a genuine national border, with guards and guns and walkie-talkies.  

Anyway, we procured the turkey at some meat shop on the Damrak, and, in order to smuggle it back into West Germany, we stopped on the outskirts of Amsterdam and my mother strapped this frozen turkey to her abdomen with copious amounts of tape, covered it with her blouse, and pretended to be pregnant.  Now, you have to understand that my mother always had a serious weight problem.  She was severely underweight.  I think that the most she ever weighed was about 105 pounds, and that was when she was pregnant.  Normally she weighed about 85 pounds, so we always had ice cream and sweets in the house, in her attempt to gain weight, which never worked.  She always complained about how it was considered rude to mention that people were fat, but apparently it was okay to say someone was skinny.  I grew up with her complaining about that double standard.  And when she died, rather young, the medical examiner told us that she weighed 69 pounds.  I mention all this only to convey imagery.  You have to imagine a very underweight woman with an extended belly at the Netherlands-West Germany border with a turkey, and both parents yelling at the kids, in American vernacular English, to shut up and not say anything, lest we spend time in some foreign jail for smuggling a turkey across the border.  

Anyway, it succeeded.  The German guards asked us about our business, and about how far along Mama was, and that sort of thing.  She managed to keep a stiff upper lip even though I'm sure that frozen turkey was freezing her flat chest and abdomen into a solid block of ice by then.  And all had a very jolly and fat Thanksgiving, American style.

Now, I'm pretty drunk, as I am normally at 9:28PM on any given saturday, but these are the facts, as nearly as I can remember them from nearly 40 years ago.  And I suggest that we consider how much the world has evolved since then.  Nowadays, everyone's doing Thanksgiving, apparently.  Until I read this thread, I had no idea that the Thais and the Turks and everyone else was celebrating what was essentially a WASP celebration of harvest, celebrated only in the United States and originating in a time before the WASPs started laying waste to the indigenous population of the Americas.  I'm impressed that we have had so much cultural influence on the people of the world.  The next time you jaded gringos bite into a turkey, think about how those poor bastards in other parts of the world apparently didn't get to enjoy Thanksgiving until relatively recently, and about how a few brave individuals, like my parents--God rest their souls--helped raise awareness of the culture of conspicuous consumption that it celebrates.

[traininthedistance]

Thanksgiving Day itself was dinner out; we made the turkey on Friday.

But that's not why I'm posting in this thread; I'm posting to note the sort of thing that happens when I go visit my parents for the long weekend.  Namely, that there appeared to be some sort of PBS-style history documentary or somesuch being played in the next room.  You know the style, complete with that David Attenborough-style British accent that all serious PBS documentary series have to have.  Except... it's a little off.  They're going through history really fast.  One moment it's the Ottoman Empire, in ten minutes it's talking about George Wallace.  And, there's a lot of talk about "Western Civilization".  As in, the West is the Best (and the best at conquering of course) because we have science!  and secular government!  and freedoms!  I mean, I do like a lot of those things, don't get me wrong, especially the science bit, but this is really oddly facile and chauvinistic and triumphant and off-putting, and... huh?  I don't get what's going on.  Oh and then the narrator throws in something about British-style "West" being better than Spanish-style "West", which just takes the whole thing up/down several notches right there.  It can't be PBS,it's just not up to basic educational standards, yakno?  But it almost sounds like it is, so we're in some sort of Uncanny Valley of edutainment.

And, then the thing wraps up.  [paraphrased].  "I'm Niall Ferguson.  Thanks for watching, see you next time." ... some other stuff... "[Name of show I didn't take note of] is funded in part by a grant from the Peter Thiel Foundation, and viewers like you!"

Well then.  It all suddenly makes sense.  

EDIT:  "Next week!  Did the Berlin Wall fall because of blue jeans?"  (That's an actual quote, not a paraphrase.)