Who's celebrated Thanksgiving outside of North America?

The celebration of Thanksgiving is mostly confined to the US and Canada. For dopers in those countries, have you ever celebrated Thanksgiving outside of North America? Why, and how did it feel different than celebrations back home? What did the locals think? And for dopers outside of North America, have you ever attended one of these celebrations?

I expect every GI who served outside CONUS celebrated Thanksgiving somehow. Does the OP want these described by every Vet or currently serving GI on the board?

I was invited to a Thanksgiving eve meal at the house of a friend and coworker in Houston; they were going to have the official meal on Thanksgiving itself with local friends and relatives. The invitation extended to several people who had to be in town for work that week, most of us foreigners. One of the things that we mentioned was that the traditional menu doesn’t quite match Houston’s “still hiding from the sun in November” weather. The image in movies tends to be more NewEnglandnication than Californication, or at least reflect what people from LA think New England looks like.

When I was in graduate school we took advantage of the shutdown and of our advisors leaving town to have a pool party, but we didn’t call it a Thanksgiving meal. This being in Miami and us being all Hispanic, tamales were more likely than turkey :slight_smile:

Canada, Guatemala, Chile, Bolivia, Belgium, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Laos, and this year will be Philippines.

I’ve barely understood what Thanksgiving was, just assumed it was the old Harvest Festival, which for the last 100 years or so in Britain is mainly a church service filled with pumpkins, corn, turnips etc. etc… Just like American Halloween stands in for All Saints Day.

Or maybe Americans were giving thanks for America.

According to Wikipedia however it dates back to the puritans of Henry VIII’s time, since they wanted no religious holiday and/or to reduce all holidays which caused laziness and lack of godly diligence:

*Before 1536 there were 95 Church holidays, plus 52 Sundays, when people were required to attend church and forego work and sometimes pay for expensive celebrations. The 1536 reforms reduced the number of Church holidays to 27, but some Puritans wished to completely eliminate all Church holidays, including Christmas and Easter. The holidays were to be replaced by specially called Days of Fasting or Days of Thanksgiving, in response to events that the Puritans viewed as acts of special providence.

*There you go. Dunno what modern Americans do.

In the Cayman Islands there are enough expats and tourists that Thanksgiving is celebrated, though it is not (yet) an official holiday. Local restaurant Chicken! Chicken! serves rotisserie turkey and most hotel restaurants put on a Thanksgiving menu. The grocery ads are typical Americana with sales on pumpkin pie filling, cranberry sauce, and the full variety of traditional Thanksgiving fare. It helps that almost all of our food is imported from the States.

Since a nasty September 2004 hurricane the locals have taken to celebrating Thanksgiving too, with a focus on family and giving thanks for enduring another hurricane season which officially closes the end of November. The coincidental timing of the end of the hurricane season could lend itself to Thanksgiving growing and maybe eventually becoming an official holiday.

When I was a student in the UK in the '80s, the university’s advisor for US students invited a bunch of us over to his house for Thanksgiving dinner. I gather he did this every year for the new students from the States so we wouldn’t feel so homesick on the holiday.

I don’t remember much about the dinner itself except that among the side-dishes were Brussels Sprouts, which was a first for me.

After dinner, we tried to play cricket in the back yard with his kids, but we were really bad at it.

Pretty much all agricultural societies have always had their traditional Fall harvest festival in one form or another.

Christians Scientists celebrate Thanksgiving all over the world, my in-laws are CS. But I’m neither American nor Canadian, so I can’t offer a comparison. I’ve also done dinner with expat Americans who weren’t CS, was pretty much the same as my in-laws. No pumpkin pie at either…

Twice I’ve happened to be in Canada for their October observance. Most recently, I was in Montreal, but apparently les Quebeçois take very little notice, and nearly everything was open. I marked the occasion with a nice shawarma in the Complex Desjardins Food Court.

I celebrated T-Day in Norway once. We had ham. It was really cold. Lots of alcohol.

London has a large ex pat American population so Thanksgiving is quite popular here. Local grocery stores stock up on turkey, cranberries and pumpkin pie mix and American families often host large dinners with their international friends. Black Friday tried to be a thing here but there was considerable backlash and even the retailer who had tried to make it a thing in the first place had a rethink so it’s not as big a deal.

We Canadians are pretty much left to fend for ourselves in the grocery stores but I can usually get a good turkey. Truth be told, I often forget and this year with both children in uni back in Canada, I went to a movie with some friends and left hubby with leftovers. I did cook a whole chicken the next weekend and he seemed cool with that.

I rarely celebrated it when I lived in the US, now that I’m in the UK it’s completely off my radar. I did spot pumpkin pie mix in the small American section of Sainsbury’s the other day.

In college I studied in London for a number of months, the lot of us celebrated it there. It was funny because you would see people at the grocery store gathering the materials and would ask “American?” and they’d almost always answer “Yeah! Thanksgiving!”

Thanksgiving might be my favorite holiday. You don’t have to buy any presents, there really isn’t any big “Thanksgiving Season”, and the only real purpose is to sit down and have a great meal (and some good wine!!) with a bunch of other folks. If you can do it with folks you like then how great is that? And I love turkey. And I love making/having turkey soup the next day (or whenever).

You non-Americans should try it. It’s really a good time, with just a little bit of effort. Cooking a turkey is not that difficult, and you can go with any sides, or ask folks to bring the sides. Just be aware that if you’re invited to my house for Turkey Day, ain’t gonna be no green-bean casserole on my Thanksgiving table, goddam it!!

I attended a Thanksgiving party in Taiwan in 2012, but it was almost all American expats abroad. We had pizza, chicken wings, and a lot of Westernized food but as I recall it no typical Thanksgiving stuff like turkey, green bean casseroles, etc. It was basically a typical house party; had a random stranger walked in on us, he wouldn’t have been able to tell what the party was for or what was going on.

Sacrilege!

At least you reminded me to add fried onion bits to my shopping list. :wink:

I put together a full Thanksgiving dinner for four out of the five years I lived in China (the first year, I went to another person’s dinner). Literally, everything is available for all of the traditional stuff, and so traditional stuff I made.

Among my guests over the years were Chinese, Aussies, Kiwis, one Dane, some Brits, Mexicans, and Afrikanners. They were all good times.

Twice I had to cook the turkey on my giant Weber gas grill, though, because Chinese houses have cute, tiny, little toy ovens (when they have ovens at all). The other two times, I managed to find smaller birds.

The US embassy in Baghdad makes a very good Thanksgiving dinner.

The best Thanksgiving I ever had was celebrated on the roof of a villa in Dubai where my wife and I were the hosts (and only Americans present). I’ll be in Ireland for Thanksgiving this year.