Turkey Day

Turkey day has come and gone, Canadian Thanksgiving that is. Yes, tis the season to be grateful… fa la la la la, la la la la… As in previous years while living overseas, on this particular second Monday of October, we have come to expect a bit of nostalgia or have certain pangs of homesickness, result of inevitably recollecting those feel-good autumn weekends not too long ago, when we would stuff our faces with copious amounts of good food around a table hemmed with family and friends. Far away from our home and our kids, our quasi melancholic musing makes us yearn for breathing that cool crisp Port Moody evening autumn air, play fighting in those mounds of bright red and orange leaves fallen from our back yard hazelnut tree, its boughs stripped bare by that cool breeze coming off the inlet, our leafy escapade inevitably interrupted by the welcoming call of the seasons inaugural fire in our living room fireplace...

OK, I admit that the above descriptive muse is more of Madeleine's take on our past Thanksgiving weekends at home, or, I guess for that matter could also be mine on days when I let myself temporarily and sentimentally migrate over to my feminine side. Most of the time, though, I like to think that my retro perspective of Thanksgivings gone-by is a bit more mannish, or dare I say realistic. Let's get real here; it doesn’t take long before that cool crispy Port Moody air turns from crispy to frigid non-stop rain, and those mounds of bright red and orange fallen leaves from our tree... well, these piles of damp heavy fallen decaying leaves somehow need to find their way into heavy plastic garbage bags and hauled off somewhere (in the frigid non-stop rain no less), and that welcoming call from our living room, enticing us to warmly and fuzzily cosy up in front of the season's first fire in our living room fireplace, well, to tell you the truth, from year to year, in my usual pyromaniacal enthusiasm, I always forget to open the chimney trap before lighting that first fire and subsequently, my absent mindedness leads to the house quickly filling up with toxic fumes emanating from the burning 6 year old bug infested firewood which was back-painstakingly chopped from that tree that fell during that huge storm in 2009, narrowly missing our children's bedrooms and...I think we all get the picture. 

So, other than the fact that we were far away from our family and friends, maybe being stuck in South East Asia on Thanksgiving wasn't so bad after all.  In the past when living overseas, we always think about Thanksgiving, what the holiday means, all those we wouldn’t get a chance to see and the laughs around that turkey dinner. Also, in the past, where ever we were living, we always managed to find the main fare of a turkey dinner, turkey.  Not so here in Thailand, land of abundance of roosters, ducks, and chickens, but void of turkeys, or turkey meat for that matter. 

Last year we celebrated Thanksgiving in Thailand at this doo at the Bangkok Hilton hosted by the Canadian Thai Chamber of Commerce and the Canadian Embassy. We paid big bucks for that Canadian Thanksgiving, met a lot of fellow Canucks, drank a lot of Canadian wine, but, darn it, missed out on good turkey. They served us some turkey roll contraption…one of the biggest let downs of my life.

Yup, it was right up there with the time a few years ago on the Rocky IV movie set when, after spending a whole day at the shooting of the final fight scene, and the camera came right up to me for a solo shot of me cheering and applauding Sylvester Stallone's pounding of that Russian dude, and, a year later at the first screening of the movie when it came to town, and to my dismay as well as the dismay of all the kids of the school where I was teaching at the time (I was working in Germany on a military base, teaching kiddies of the military…ergo, great fans of Sylvester Stallone pummelling to smithereens some poor Russian), and these poor innocent children of our fighting men and women, all hungry for a hero, had gotten wind of my spark with fame that would inevitably launch my acting career in Hollywood, ... I sadly ended up (or rather my solo scene ended up) on the cutting room floor. Alas, I was doomed to a life of a nameless nobody, an uncelebrated unknown, a fallen star who had not yet risen to fame. I digress, back to the turkey.  

So how can we celebrate Thanksgiving without turkey? I figured that if His Excellency the Ambassador of Canada in Thailand could not find a turkey, what chance would a nameless nobody and an uncelebrated unknown like myself have of finding one. I was ready to settle for chicken, but alas, my friend and neighbour Ryan came to the rescue.

     

Next entry - The Man Who Saved Thanksgivng