My Mercigiving Dinner

As an assistant d'anglais, part of my duty is to teach my students a little bit about American culture and society. I brought Thanksgiving to France by writing out the story of Thanksgiving, then leaving blanks in the story and having the students play Madlibs. Nobody really thought it was fun except me. ("More than 100 Pilgrims got on the bus, which was called the pencil, and set sail for classroom, a new world where they hoped to find socks and dogs. They brought with them only simple foods like children, cars, and shoes.") Most of my students are so resistant to anything stinking of imagination that they were hesitant even to fill in the blanks with the nouns and verbs we had come up with together. ("But, Madame, this doesn't make sense!" Uh, yeah, I KNOW!!! It's supposed to be FUNNY!) I'm sure the Pilgrims, at least, would be happy that I'm spreading their story.

Though my Thanksgiving venture flopped in the classroom, the day itself was a success. I celebrated Thanksgiving dinner with ten Americans, one Canadian, and my three English friends. We pulled together a pretty awesome meal, considering that most French people have never heard of cranberries and are clueless about the merits of sweet potatoes. I made lowfat sweet potato casserole, which everyone loved, and which no one suspected was filled with mounds of butter, three types of sugar, and whole milk. (If you're gonna do it, you may as well do it right, right?)

Being so far from my family--and on my favorite holiday!!--was sad, but our gathering proved that the Thanksgiving spirit was still alive. Sharing food somehow brings out the best in people.

Later, we decided to play a game of Catchphrase; to start off the game, we had to form teams by counting off "one, two, one, two..." We didn't even get halfway around the room before everybody got confused and we had to start over. In the noise of everyone trying to tell everyone else whether they were on team 1 or team 2, someone shouted out, "And we're teachers!!" Yes, we were a roomful of college graduates, and we couldn't even count off by twos. I'm going to blame that one on the wine.