Thanksgiving in Germany

I’d been brilliantly free of homesickness here…until Thanksgiving happened.  It was really hard to be away, but also sort of fun integrating Thanksgiving into my life here.

Still, getting up early and going to school Thursday felt a bit wrong.  Seeing everyone’s going-home-for-thanksgiving Facebook statuses made me a little sad.  Getting a “merry thanksgiving!” text from one of my British friends made me laugh.  And watching my students draw hand-turkeys and write what they were thankful for was totally amusing (I got a lot of “I’m thankful for Bayern München” slash other football clubs).

In class, before setting the kids loose to draw hand-turkeys, I would usually briefly go over the history of thanksgiving and then talk about food…most of my German kids have never had a full turkey as dinner before (although I learned goose is popular at Christmas), and they seemed quite weirded out by the idea of pumpkin pie.  Even after I told them it was my absolutely favorite Thanksgiving-food, and one of my favorite foods overall, they still all said they’d rather try turkey.  Silly German students…

Friday night, I went with Seba and some other students to their professor’s, an American teaching at the Music School here who was hosting a Thanksgiving dinner.  It was absolutely amazing – all of the typical Thanksgiving dishes, done to perfection – but also super strange to be having Thanksgiving dinner at 9pm on a Friday, with French, Chilean, Peruvian and Iranian people.  Not typical but definitely great!

And now that Thanksgiving is over, it’s onto Christmas music!  Hopefully the holiday cheer all around (Germans do some fabulous decorations) will keep the homesickness away? Christmas markets here I come…