Traditional Thanksgiving

I’m a first generation Canadian who grew up eating Indian food with my hands. I remember first having to explain what I ate for dinner to my swimming instructor when I was eleven. It was an innocent question — what did you have for dinner? But to me it was fraught with anxiety. It was the late 80s and Indian food was not mainstream yet. Today most of you would understand if I described a meal of whole wheat roti, potato and cauliflower curry and plain yogurt. But back then I felt I had to translate roti into bread and curry into vegetables. The absence of meat was strange to my swimming instructor, but I thought little of it. I didn’t grow up with much meat. Lentils and yogurt were more frequent sources of protein in our home. Occasionally, we had chicken, rarely beef and never pork.

When I learned about Thanksgiving and its association with turkey in school, I asked my mother to make some. She had some idea what turkey was, but no idea how to cook it. She declared the bird too big to prepare for our small family of four and opted to roast a chicken instead. I didn’t mind much, after all, I had never even tasted turkey and had no idea what I was missing. It was something that you were supposed to eat on Thanksgiving, so I thought to ask for it, but was not disappointed by roast chicken, potatoes and carrots, minus the curry spices. The meal was topped with store bought pumpkin pie, that tasted a bit like the cardboard box it came in. My brother called such Canadian meals “cool” and relished them as he rarely did the Indian ones during our childhood. I didn’t have much of a preference, eating whatever was placed in front of me. Ironically, as adults my brother probably cherishes my mom’s Indian cooking more than I do. As the years passed, I gave up asking for turkey on Thanksgiving. The holiday became just another long weekend, an occasion to visit family and share a meal, more often than not an Indian one.

This year I was invited to my boyfriend’s family for a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. Although we had chicken instead of turkey, the meal included all sorts of traditional fixings such as cranberry sauce, potatoes and carrots, as well as non-traditional items, such as Brussels sprouts coated in maple glaze and walnuts. My bf topped the meal with a homemade pumpkin pie that no store bought version could compete with. The table resembled something out of a book or a movie, decorated with blood orange pumpkins, autumn squash and crisp, white candles. We gave thanks with a toast rather than bowed our heads in prayer, which broke from tradition a little, as did the baseball game we watched on the big screen TV afterwards.

Although I thoroughly enjoyed the meal and was grateful for having been included in the festivities, I couldn’t help but reflect on past Thanksgivings with my own family. We may have replaced turkey with curry and bread with roti, but we always gave thanks. In fact, we gave thanks before every family dinner and continue to do so. The day after my “traditional Thanksgiving dinner”, I visited my parents and shared their meal of curried chicken and rice. The table was devoid of decorations, but for once I felt like that too was a traditional Thanksgiving and was grateful for it.