Thanksgiving Abroad

From Lincoln's 1863 invitation to make Thanksgiving a national holiday: I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving....

If it weren't for Aislin's history text, I'd have had no idea that the Pilgrims lived in the Netherlands for something like 12 years before taking the long haul over the Atlantic. It's a good thing there was some connection because otherwise we'd have taken it a lot harder that we couldn't find a whole turkey for sale anywhere in the Utrecht area. I was left with lame explanations to the kids about how the whole spirit of Thanksgiving was the fact that the Pilgrims were using what they could find on the land they'd immigrated to... which was why we should have pannenkoeken for Thanksgiving instead. Pancakes as a main dish? I had them at "Pan--".

As it turns out, there are enough American expats living in the Netherlands that there's an interdenominational Thanksgiving Day service organized each year at Pieterskerk in Leiden, the church where the Pilgrims registered their births, marriages, and deaths. They did not, apparently, actually attend church there... I'm supposing because its lofty roof, ogives, and stained glass would have been too ostentatious for Puritan types. (Perhaps they would have approved when the catastrophic gunpowder explosion in Leiden harbor that leveled half the city in 1807 blew out every stained glass window in the place except one.)

Jeff managed the rare day off on Thanksgiving Day, so we wrestled Dylan into a collared shirt, looked up all the bookstores that carry books in English, and sallied forth to the picturesque college town right down the rails. We finally got the obligatory canal/windmill/bike picture, too, although it didn't really catch the bike partially submerged in the canal right there (and you'll have to enlarge the picture to catch the overexposed windmill). We knew we were getting close to the church when we started hearing American-accented English on every side. It was a jarring experience to walk into the church itself and hear nothing but the mother tongue for the first time in nearly three months.

Aislin and I found seats and she pulled out her sketch book while Jeff and Dylan hung our coats. The friendly lady in front of us turned around, sized up Aislin, and blustered, "Well you look like a nice, quiet girl, thank God." Aislin looked serenely up from her book. The lady continued, undeterred by my best efforts to demonstrate active disinterest, on a jag about the horrible preschoolers who had sat behind her the last two years and forced her to move in the middle of the service because they couldn't stop chattering and kicking her chair. When she moved on to her son's medical history, I uncharitably found myself suspecting that someone's meds might be in need of adjustment. When she finally paused for breath, I did manage to inform her brightly that my four-year-old would be arriving imminently. Although her visage darkened, she did not move and her attention was thankfully diverted to another victim a few moments later. Dylan behaved angelically and ended up sleeping for most of the hour. I swear there was no Dramamine involved, just the perfectly natural soporific effect of churches on preschoolers.

Afterward we wandered about Leiden a little and basked in the college atmosphere while we sought out the bookstores and a pannenkoeken huis. (Hey, a promise is a promise.) We found the pancakes first, thankfully. Aislin ordered the kids' special, which turned out to involve a pancake served with chocolate and four pots of candy to put on top... and that was just a prelude to the ice cream sundae for dessert. We do live in the land where grown adults consume chocolate sprinkles on bread for breakfast, so I don't know why I was so surprised. Here's Aislin straightfacedly informing me that her pancake had adequate nutritional content to get her through the rest of the day. I'll omit the blurred pictures of her zipping maniacally around after consuming it. Then we found a couple of wonky college bookstores and treated ourselves to two overpriced novels that we're now racing each other to finish. (I got a headstart while Jeff slept on the train.)

So we survived Thanksgiving without pumpkin pie and even got in some Pilgrim cred to boot. Now it's on to Sinterklaas...