CULTURE

Europeans Are Weary Of American Culture Yet We Can’t Stop Copying It

Why am I hosting a Thanksgiving dinner when I’m not even American?

Photo by Prchi Palwe on Unsplash

It’s late November and I’m feeling festive for a holiday that doesn’t exist in my country. The evening is cool but not cold in Lisbon, and the air is perfumed with the warm smokiness of roasted chestnuts from the bonfires of street vendors, also known as Magusto.

Autumn doesn’t mean pumpkin pie and turkey for us here in Portugal. It doesn’t mean Halloween either, yet storefronts were all lathered in mini orange pumpkins, dangling plastic skeletons, cobwebs, and ghosts last month.

Traditionally, we celebrate Carnival in February, as do many other European countries, as well as Brazil. We never used to celebrate Halloween, but now on October 31st, you can find plenty of teenagers dressed like zombies taking selfies on the metro.

Capitalism doesn’t care if it makes no cultural sense, and neither do we.

So here I am, a Portuguese woman, elbow-deep in Thanksgiving prep — a very American holiday for a very not-American life.

To be completely fair, I lived in the United States from age two to seven so the influence of the holiday was directly implanted in my…