Thanksgiving abroad

My first Thanksgiving abroad. It’s always been one of my favorite holidays, partly because of the sense of travel and going home it always brings to mind. It reminds me of bracing for another trip to 30th Street Station or Penn Station, and the feeling of getting a chance to take a few days to catch your breath and reflect on the new year (whatever the calendar says, I think they always start for us in the fall). I remember going back my first year away from home, standing on the Peter Pan bus all the way from Utica to Albany because it was packed with kids like me heading east. And I remember that year I spent the holiday alone in Washington because I couldn’t get away, and feeling very tremendously lonely and glad that I knew that feeling at least once, and wanted to leave it at just once. And of course, last year, when I was still on paternity leave, and when Olga and I and Mom put together a rather comprehensive little dinner for ourselves between looking after our three-week old. That was the first turkey we made, which I always imagined was a major life milestone.

So since in Moscow, Thanksgiving is just another Thursday, I had a full day of work, But we’re planning on putting something together on Friday, a little late. We’ve had some help from parents-in-law with the shopping – a turkey breast, some klyukva (which I suspect are Russian cranberries) and the ingredients for a reverse engineered version of Bell’s Seasoning (the trick is you can only find sage at the pharmacy, where it is sold as herbal medicine).

Alas, the football I’ll have seen around the holiday is likely to be England crapping itself against Croatia on Wednesday (by the way, between that and the announcement earlier in the day that the government had lost millions of people’s personal financial information, it really wasn’t a good day over there). I still have plenty happy memories of the World Series to be thankful for, and we signed Mike Lowell!