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YOU CAN TAKE THE GIRL OUT OF AMERICA….
Thanksgiving. In many ways it’s my favorite holiday – all coziness and delicious food with no gift-giving scenarios to navigate. But it is a tricky one as an expat parent – trying to celebrate the quintessential American holiday outside of America.
Halloween has some obvious elements of universal appeal and Christmas and Easter are of course celebrated, albeit with some variety, in many places around the world. But the celebration of the pilgrims, the football, the overabundance of carbs and the earnest, on-demand gratitude make for a uniquely American phenomenon.
It’s been a very long time since I celebrated a Thanksgiving in America – only once in the last 15 years or so. But we celebrate it every year wherever we are, whether it’s a Friendsgiving overflowing with expats bringing their favorite family recipe or, as in more recent years, I’m cooking with local finds for a crowded table where I am the only American except for my kids.
Ah, my kids.
The ones who ask me, every year, “What’s Thanksgiving?”
…BUT IT’S HARD TO TAKE SOME AMERICA FROM THE MOM AND GIVE IT TO HER EXPAT KIDS.
We have been through this before, of course. The kids are 8, 6 and 3. Even the three-year-old can tell me that Halloween means candy and that the sparkly star decorations go up at Christmastime. When I mention that Thanksgiving is the day we eat my grandmother’s special pumpkin chiffon pie, they sort of remember.
But why doesn’t Thanksgiving sink in? Is it because they don’t make turkey handprints and leaf rubbings at school here? Because we usually do it on the following Saturday so no one has extra time off from school or work? Because there are no presents? Because we don’t have fish fingers, pasta or chocolate cake so they don’t get why this is considered such a feast of special food? (Why is this a seemingly common thing among kids? I remember as a kid looking forward to eating holiday meals in the same way that my parents seemed to.)
It’s all of the above, I think. But I think it’s important – for their sense of identity outside their daily life, for helping build a grounding sense of tradition in our family, for strengthening the essential-to-me part of our human spirit that knows how to properly celebrate an occasion.
So this year I’ve tried a little harder. I wanted them to understand a bit more about the meaning behind the holiday, to enjoy the food and the coziness and the company, and of course, to give thanks in some way. Even when it all looks a little different.
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TRYING ON TRADITIONS
Until now I’ve always gone light on the history part of Thanksgiving. I’ve used their age as an excuse to myself, but really, I wasn’t quite sure how to approach it. In my childhood I was taught, as most American children were in those days, that after surviving a long, hard time getting settled into their new land, the surviving pilgrims finally had a satisfying harvest. They held an enormous feast to celebrate it, and invited the local Native Americans who had been so helpful in teaching them about their new home.
It’s a nice story, and my kids, particularly my eldest, is more than capable of getting it. He’s into history, and geography, and has recently become keen to explore the American part of his heritage. (Keep an eye on the keys for your pickup truck, Uncle Steve!)
Except that now, of course, we are a bit more open about the fact that the nice story is not exactly how it went down.
And this is where I have always become stuck. In many ways I am still in the naïve stages of parenthood where I am in denial about all of the difficult things my kids will encounter in the not-so-distant future – cross-cultural playground dramas feel hard enough at the moment. Even something this detached from our daily life as this trips me up.
But then I remembered some of the mental and emotional work I’d put into preparing for the holiday season – pinpointing our family values to use as key messages. For just this purpose, to make the holidays feel more meaningful from now on.
One of our values is empathy – for us, this means consideration of and connection to others, and also appreciating diversity. In many ways, it was the answer to my question.
So I told my kids the story again. They remembered who the pilgrims were (!!) and tried to imagine what it would be like to arrive at the end of a long, frightening journey with no warm house, comfortable bed or filling meal to welcome you. How the pilgrims would have had to figure out so very many things from scratch, and how different things might have been from what they knew in England.
And we thought about the Native Americans – what it must have felt like to encounter these strangers arriving in their homeland and claiming it as their own. How they were different from the pilgrims. And how it can sometimes be hard to get along with someone who is very different from you, but how you can also learn a lot.
We even took it a step farther and talked about Christopher Columbus “discovering” America in the “first” place.
“Did he really discover it, Kiddo?”
“Well no, Mama, because there were people already living there.”
My heart grew three sizes that day.
There is more to talk about in the future, of course, but for now this feels like a step in the right direction.
LIGHT IN OUR HEARTS AND IN OUR HOME
I have been thinking of one of our family values as Light – bringing to mind for me a sense of spirituality and calm, a positive perspective, and reverence for nature.
Light crept in around the edges of our holiday this year.
I think I felt it most in the sense of nature, and how we made the natural rhythm of the season a part of the context of our celebration. There was the lightness of the kids playing outside in the afternoon – which turned out to be the last warm autumn day – just before our shared meal with friends. There was the glow of a warm gathering around the table as the autumn winds finally started to blow. And the light from the warm fire we made the following day, when it was just the five of us cozy-ing up together against the first cold rainy day of the season.
And, of course, there was lightness of perspective and grace my husband and I showed each other when wading through the cleanup after it all 😉
I am trying (oh, I am trying) to lighten up about the food. They all like mashed potatoes now, the middle one likes all the veggies but doesn’t like poultry under any circumstances at the moment, and the eldest was actually more enthusiastic than in years past. (To be fair, I didn’t really like my stuffing experiment this year either – I think we are not sage people.) They are not big fans of my grandmother’s pumpkin chiffon pie, which I’ve had every Thanksgiving of my life, but my improvised apple crumble was pretty popular.
A couple of days later my eldest even commented on how much he liked being able to “eat a lot” and how much he enjoyed having “lots of people all around the table.”
So there is a glimmer of appreciation there somewhere. Maybe they’ll grow into it after all. Maybe it just takes time.
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MINDS (AND A MONTH) FULL OF APPRECIATION
Mindfulness is our third family value. One way this comes to life for us is in practicing gratitude with the kids – being mindful and appreciative of our blessings in life. And of course this is top of mind at Thanksgiving.
Sometimes, though, I feel that in talking to kids about values and the like, the language we use feels too stilted, too formal. That we suddenly switch to textbook mode and use words and phrases that we ordinarily wouldn’t in regular daily life. When I hear other parents, or indeed myself, do this, I cringe. Not at what they are trying to do, because it is an indisputably noble intent, but at how it sounds – like a parenting book is talking and not them.
This is sort of what happened when I tried to talk to my kids about being grateful at Thanksgiving.
“What are you grateful for?”
Blank stares.
“What are you thankful for? Happy about?”
“That Christmas is coming and we’ll get presents soon.”
Right.
I should probably clarify that my kids do sometimes practice gratitude unprompted. They thank me when I’ve made a meal they like, they leave us little notes of appreciation about weekend outings and playing games together, we all look up at the sunrise during sleepy, traffic-y drives to school.
I just don’t think they really know what it’s called.
But that being said, I think there is a useful place for being able to practice gratitude “on demand” and to understand what we are doing. So, in the spirit of building this muscle, we are trying another approach.
This year, we are having an “Appreciation Advent Calendar” in which each day we practice a bit of gratitude (or appreciation, which they seem to grasp better for some reason). Out of the pocket comes the day’s ornament, and in goes each family member’s thought of the day.
We have started by working in themes – this first week we are each writing something we like about someone else. We’ll decide the following week’s themes together – next week will probably be something we like about work/school, then something we like about where we live, maybe the final week will be “open.”
On Christmas Eve we’ll display everyone’s contributions so that we can have a Christmas Day full of grateful sentiment.
So far my eldest is getting into it, the middle one has written down some of my suggestions word for word and is wondering if we need to keep doing this every day, and the littlest is dutifully doing her “writing”, mumbling something about “friends” and stuffing the papers in whatever pocket strikes her fancy.
It’s an experiment. Stay tuned to see how it all turns out.
And maybe next year we’ll try some turkey handprints and leaf rubbings, too.