Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is my absolute favorite holiday and I wasnt going to let it just pass by while out of the country. My friend down the road Emily and I had big plans for preparing a thanksgiving feast for our family and friends- traditional, but with some chilean estilo. We split up family recepies and came up with a brief menu- turkey, mash patatoes, green beans, gingered carrots, corn, salad, cranberry sause, pumpkin and apple pies, stuffing... the works. I was in charge of the bird. Now, I thought stuffing a turkey was normal, but apparently its not a universal technique. My host father, who was also a first time turkey chef, was very concerned about our stuffing recepie and I kept on telling him were just going to "wing in", make this mix of almost everything we´ve got, and throw it in the bird. Saturday morning (thanksgiving was on saturday in Chile becuase we didn´t have time off) we woke up "early" 11:00am and began to prepare. Rubbed and stuffed we tossed her in the oven and let her cook. The ovens down here don´t have temperature dials-- so we turned the controls to what I would call "sorta hot" and set a tentative timer. Six hours later, that little red button popped up and my host dad and I got overly excited. At 8:30 our gests began to arrive. Emily and her family, the other exchange students in LA, and the two Españoles (I mean Basques, pardon me). We had a brief cocktail hour before thanksgiving which included home made pisco sours and appetizers- we had too much food. My parents even bought an eletric knife... just to carve the turkey. It was a little exessive, yet funny watching Ricardo and Oscar, Emilys dad, figure out how to cut it... The Pumpkin pie was a hit- they intially didnt like the idea, but the two pies were gone in the end. Oscar, who is an absolute character I wish everyone could meet him, insisted on bringin chamange- im not even sure if thats custom for thanksgiving, but we had it. We were definetly on a differnt time frame. At home we´d eat early in the evening then roll over and fall sleep in front of a football game. In Chile, we ate and conversed until about 1 in the morning and then all the kids went out.... Nonetheless it was a typical and traditional thanksgiving and I was glad to share with people here in Chile.