American, Abroad
Three Thanksgivings in London
1.
I can’t tell you about waking up on the morning of my first Thanksgiving in London, because I didn’t go to sleep the night before.
There must have been a better way to approach ‘British History from 1750’. But every week I’d be called into my tutor’s office and he’d plunk down a list of a dozen books and a completely unhelpful ‘question’, something along the lines of: “Pitt the Younger. Go wild. Ten pages.” I’d leave his musty office and march up Chancery Lane and take out as many books as I could carry, seven or eight minimum, and lug them home where they’d sit, untouched, until the day before the paper was due. In England I learned the art of the all-nighter.
(I had an essay due that Thursday, on “public opinion’s influence on foreign policy under Gladstone and Disraeli,” and honestly it’s a shame I can’t remember a single thing about the paper or the course itself because I’m actually pretty curious about the topic. It’s all a bit hazy now but, to be fair, it was all a bit hazy then.)
The lucidity following a sleepless night comes in waves, and the actual academic responsibility punctuated what was otherwise a fever-dream of Thanksgiving cheer—I remember wandering along the banks of the Thames giving spare change to homeless people and telling literally anyone who crossed my path that it was Thanksgiving. The elderly pair of clerks who helped me find cranberry sauce at Sainsbury’s were particularly effulgent. “Oh goodness, my dear! Happy Thanksgiving!” they cried, as if it were my birthday. I went home tried to cook zucchini the way my mother always made it; I was new to cooking, and I failed spectacularly.
Because it was a lonely day, too—other Americans that I’d befriended were aggressively indifferent about the holiday, and British friends were busy, so I cooked and ate alone, trying to reconstruct traditions that I’d never particularly enjoyed until I missed their familiarity. London is a famously cold city, eight million tiny islands focused inwards, lives overlapping but struggling to touch each other. I was my own island, certainly, perpetually disoriented, and I felt the palpable distance of the Atlantic nearly every day that fall. (A decade ago, we fumbled along with occasional e-mails and shaky Skype connections.) Thanksgiving, a strange hybrid of family via patriotism, seemed to foster a sense of homesickness as unique as the holiday itself.
The shining point in a mostly strange day was the American service at St Paul’s Cathedral. A friend who’d grown up all over the world told me about his Thanksgiving traditions in England: a sojourn to London, where they’d visit Hamley’s toy shop and attend the service at St Paul’s (and how once, at age six, he was separated from his parents on a double-decker bus). So I went to the cathedral that morning, and it was definitely a subdued affair—Marines in full uniform, a speech from the American ambassador—but also a remarkably grounding hour on a day when it was easy to feel unmoored. I sometimes think that Americans aren’t really foreigners here—we’ve got the shared language, history, and culture, after all—but we are expatriates, too. I’m not particularly patriotic, by any means, but I took comfort in sitting in a room with a thousand other Americans that day, if only for an hour or so.
2.
Two years later I was back in Britain, this time working in a t-shirt shop in Edinburgh, on South Bridge just off the Royal Mile. I spent whole days sorting and carefully folding cheap and cheesy t-shirts, sliding them into square plastic wrappers and taking inventories—“So we should probably order more FRANKIE SAYS RELAX, but it looks like the Green Lantern just isn’t selling.” Someone was always bagpiping just outside our door. I took Thanksgiving and Black Friday off weeks in advance; I needed to get out of Scotland, badly.
I rode the late train down the English coast and stayed with a friend who lived just behind the Tate Modern, and Thanksgiving morning I dragged him across the river for the American service at St Paul’s. It was becoming ritual now, taking on a weight of its own in my memory: this was the place where I joined other Americans to take a moment to acknowledge our collective culture, a point of focus in the general morass of living overseas. By this point I’d forgotten about the friend who initially told me to go—this was just the thing Americans did on Thanksgiving here: in place of turkey and stuffing (or, for most people, before the turkey and stuffing), we went to church .
We sat in the north transept that morning, and I remember it was extraordinarily sunny, the kind of low-hanging glaring sun that you get here around this time of year, when the sun arcs overhead slowly all morning and then sets just before four. I went to church a fair bit back then—as I do here in London now—at least amongst my peers, or amongst people who don’t think of themselves as ‘religious’ or ‘church-goers.’ Most of what I’m seeking there is routine and ritual, the comfortably predictable shape of a service, hymns, epistle, sermon, collection, Eucharist. All of that is off the table during the Thanksgiving service: the ritual takes a shape of its own, Marines, ambassador, ‘America the Beautiful’ and all. The sort of pageantry that would embarrass me back home seems more meaningful with distance.
My friend rattled on about how I’d cut short his sleep schedule, more good-natured than anything, but I could still see him fading in regular intervals, so as I led him around central London for the remainder of the day we stopped in at Starbucks after Starbucks for tiny takeaway cups of espresso. We found ourselves at TGI Fridays in Leicester Square for a traditional American meal, the sort of thing that my friends and I do all the time, ‘Wouldn’t it be stupid but also amazing to have Thanksgiving dinner at TGI Fridays,’ and we laugh about it and then suddenly we’re ordering blue cocktails and sizzling fajitas. I thought back to my previous Thanksgiving in London, and was infinitely grateful to be sharing a meal with an old friend, blue cocktails and all.
3.
In the intervening half-decade, Thanksgivings were wrapped up in the flurry that accompanies what we call a ‘short week’ at the magazine—a truncated schedule to allow for the holiday, a few frenzied days of production squeezed into an autumn already littered with thick special issues and long nights of early closes. I spent several Thanksgivings running to catch the last train upstate late Wednesday night; my family drove down to join me one year and I served a meal that had all the hallmarks of ‘young person tries to host first Thanksgiving for parents disaster’—the capstone was my cat, sick that week and peeing on every single soft surface in the apartment. My parents sighed but took it in stride; they helped me bag up all the bedding for industrial-strength washing later, and they seemed to like my squash soup well enough.
But this year I was back in London, and the day began at St Paul’s, of course, this time via the 242 bus, which became ensnarled in so much traffic that the driver announced that he was essentially giving up and terminating the route early. The service was beautiful, but left me feeling a little hollow—the priest, dealing with a recent enormous personal loss, fell back on the rhetoric that turns me off in church, the sort of ‘Jesus is the only answer’ thing that will never be enough answer for me, or for so many that shy away from religion more generally. The woman seated in front of was loving it, though, nodding firmly whenever he said ‘Jesus.’ When we started singing ‘America the Beautiful,’ she began to cry.
I am an island once again in London, significantly less isolated than the first go-around but maybe a bit more adrift. It’s partly the course I’m doing here, and the work I’m doing on the side; it’s partly the act of uprooting that I did a few months ago, and the reluctance to plant here, to plan firmly, to winnow focuses and interests too quickly and too narrowly. (A few days later, while working on my Year in Reading essay for The Millions, I write, “ I grasp for the familiar, but I’m here to look for the new.” This sentiment runs under everything I do, and it leaves me feeling vaguely unsettled from day to day.)
I walk down to the Embankment, for old time’s sake, and wind my way through the West End up towards UCL, for a complicated, occasionally incomprehensible lecture on JavaScript (I find all JS lectures complicated and occasionally incomprehensible, even the simplest stuff) that puts a definite damper on my holiday spirit. But afterwards I gather with collection of new friends—two other Americans, a Swede, and an Englishman—at a Mexican restaurant near Euston Station. One of the Americans is running late—we have finished a whole pitcher of margaritas by the time he arrives—but he whirls in dressed in reds and oranges and browns and gleefully tosses a bag of candy corn on the table. I’ve never been so happy to see candy corn in my life.
What are we thankful for? We go around the table, one by one, and the thread that runs through our answers feels just right: we are all newcomers here, migrants and transplants (well, save the English guy, but he is a newcomer to the traditional Thanksgiving meal, at a Mexican restaurant near Euston Station). We’re all struggling a bit, but we’re mostly grateful for the struggle, for the chance to struggle in this city. Do I read too much into all of this? It’s just a day on the calendar, after all. But holidays exist, amongst other reasons, for us to mark off time, to pause and take stock. On Thanksgiving here, more than most other days of the year, I am an American, abroad. Maybe it’s all in my head, but a little bit of needed perspective comes, however haltingly.
