Celebrated with Americans, mixed group of locals and Americans, and where I was the only American in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan.
Best experience is to have a great local meal. Worst experience going to a very expensive restaurant to have a very mediocre “traditional” turkey dinner and/or getting expensive catering to pick up a western hotel turkey with all the accompaniments.
In other words, go celebrate the spirit of Thanksgiving but don’t try to recreate a US dinner dish per dish.
Absolutely best Thanksgiving ever abroad? 1985 hiking thru Tibetan borderlands from one province in China to a different province in China to avoid the police in the former. A buddy of mine and I camped outside of a small Tibetan village. It was probably around 8,000 feet elevation, absolutely clear night, zero light pollution (nearest electricity was probably 20 miles away, nearest city with say 10k population was probably a hundred miles away, nearest 1M+ city area was at least 500 miles away. The skies were amazing. Spotted quite a few satellites and shooting stars. Watched the moon rise (IIRC it was close to a full moon, and we watched it slowly light up one side of the deep river gorge like dawn). We were the entertainment for the village. The local kids took it upon themselves to build us a big ol’ honking bonfire. Dinner was some Tibetan barley bread and something akin to peanut brittle. Best Thanksgiving ever!
The problem is that nobody has the day off, so it has to start late, and you can’t expect your guests to have the next off, either, so the merry-making is rather limited.
When we’re in Colombia during Thanksgiving, as we are now, it’s a decision whether to bother going through with it.
I celebrated Thanksgiving in Chile twice while serving an LDS mission, but it was mostly with a bunch of other gringos, so I’m not sure it counts. Image a group of 20-year-old young men trying to bake a turkey, and it probably went worse than you imagined.
Woah woah, I can’t let that comment pass. I had no idea brussel sprouts were a Thanksgiving ‘thing’, but in the UK, they are a mandatory side dish with Christmas dinner (which is, you guessed it, turkey nine times out of ten). It’s pretty much the only meal we have them with, but there’ll scarcely be a dinner table across the country without them on Christmas Day, so I don’t get your Brit friends comment at all.
Sprouts are no more ‘poor food’ than any other green vegetable. ie, not.
Now, if you’d served them corn, and they were a bit old school, then I ‘may’ understand (my 90 year old father comes from a generation who only served corn to farm animals so he refuses to eat the stuff. No one under 80 would agree with him, though).
Well in the UK, most people have turkey for Christmas dinner, so you can reckon on being able to buy fresh ones in supermarkets from about the start of December. They vanish entirely on December 26th (I should know, I fancied doing a late Christmas dinner on around the 27th last year for friends… all fresh turkeys had gone.) You can buy frozen ones in larger supermarkets at other times of the year, and you can always find fresh turkey portions (breast, mince etc), what with it being a Weight Watchers friend.
If you go to a major chain supermarket in the US, like Safeway, I’d be surprised to find many (any?) “fresh” turkeys, even this time of year. Frozen is pretty standard. You buy it at least a week in advance and, depending on the size, let it slowly defrost in the fridge for a few days. At the fancier markets, you need to order in advance if you want a fresh turkey. This is no time for amateurs!!
More and more, people where I live are ordering a partially pre-cooked turkey. You place your order well in advance, and the store preps it so all you have to do is pick it up on Thursday, pop in the oven for an an hour or two and you’re done. It often comes with a bunch of sides, too.
There are plenty of fresh turkeys around here. I’ve never seen a shortage of them anywhere. The fresh ones go in the freezer right after Thanksgiving. There are a lot of frozen turkeys also, more and more of them seem to be frozen each year, so maybe this is a trend still heading eastward.
Geese are increasingly difficult to find here also. There might be a few frozen ones at the grocery around Christmas. I’ve served goose for Thanksgiving before just to take a break from the turkey but it’s difficult to find a good sized fresh goose in November, apparently they’re raised for the Christmas season and still need another month or so to fatten up. The first time I wanted to this I was hosting Thanksgiving for 18 people, luckily I decided to take a test run and it was clear even two of the geese available weren’t going to suffice so I got a big turkey and double stuffed it. I guess if I wanted to do a big meal with goose again I’d stop by a farm in the summer and let them know I’m looking for a Thanksgiving goose. I’d prefer goose over turkey, much more flavorful. I did lard a turkey with goose fat one time, was really delicious.
When I lived in Hungary, we did Thanksgiving every year. It was the holiday I most looked forward to, so much so that even when I moved back to the US, I visited Hungary twice during Thanksgiving so I could spend it there with my friends.
It didn’t feel all that much different than Thanksgiving back here. I do know the first year we have a problem sourcing a whole turkey, and just ended up with a bone-in turkey breast. All the poultry vendors at the outdoor market there looked at us like we were crazy looking for an egész pulyka (“whole turkey.”) We realized later that we should have just made a special request beforehand, but our first Thanksgiving was a bit of a spontaneous affair. (Since then, though, I’ve noticed by the time I left in 2003, five years later, that the poultry vendors glommed on to the fact there was an American expat population looking for whole turkeys towards the end of November, and stocked them.)
The other difficulty was finding cranberries. One of the local specialty shops would sell bags of Ocean spray cranberries, but they were bloody expensive. Something like $7 a 12 oz bag. But, we bit the bullet, as it wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without the cranberries.
Generally, I would do almost all the cooking. Turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, pumpkin pie (which I had to make from the local butternut squash), stuffing/dressing, cranberry sauce, and roast root veggies. (No green bean casserole for us.) And lots of wine. The locals and expats from outside the US all enjoyed it (pumpkin pie seemed to be the one item generating the most interest and requests for a recipe.) My favorite Thanksgivings have always been the ones I spent there.
Well, my college roomie’s husband has some very weird and tightwad ideas about how to live his life. He turns off the water heater after morning showers, the kitchen is literally so cold in winter that you can see your breath, etc. so it’s entirely possible that it’s just him! If I go back to visit them. I may just stay in a hotel.
I had Thanksgiving in a foreign student dormitory in Beijing in 1984, and a hotel Thanksgiving dinner in Japan (I can’t remember where – Osaka, I think) in 1987. The Beijing Thanksgiving was great because we were a bunch of student friends having the time of our lives on a grand adventure: the first Oregon University study abroad program to the PRC. It was the skinniest turkey I’ve ever seen. We asked the program manager where the turkey came from and he said “Don’t ask.” I don’t remember much else about the meal. We had the cafeteria cook, “Cookie,” come out and take a bow to a round of applause for going to the trouble of making a simulated traditional dinner for us.
In Japan my wife and I saw an ad in Kansai Time Out magazine, an English language publication for local expats, for a traditional American Thanksgiving dinner at some hotel, so we went there. The meal was unremarkable but adequate. One item on the plate was foreign to us and we never figured out what it was. It might have been pureed turnips. As an experience, it was kind of lonely, because there was just me and the wife eating the sort of meal that in the U.S. would have been shared with a group of family and friends. Which is kinda the whole point of Thanksgiving. We were on our own in Japan. There were no Americans living anywhere near us.
