Thanksgiving... sort of

I've got to say that Thanksgiving just isn't the same when the kids have to go to school. We let Aislin play hooky and would have let Dylan do the same, but when it became clear to him that going to Leiden meant missing both show and tell AND the coveted position of line leader (which equates roughly to being the class despot for a day), there was no question that school would win out. I'll tell you, true love is adding two hours to your Thanksgiving commute so your five-year-old can be first in line three times that day. Ms. Karen let me know that Dylan made the most of his status that day, though. Once she found him standing on a chair clapping his hands in the manner that the teachers do to get the kids' attention, utterly in vain, not a single student heeding his call. Another time she overheard him chastising another classmate that he was going to have to send her to the principal's office if she committed some unknown offense once more.

But I digress. It was gratifying to get to repeat our trip to Pieterskerk in Leiden again this year for the polydenominational "service of remembrance" since most of our American holiday rituals aren't replicable in the Netherlands (my kingdom for a pumpkin pie) and there's something extraordinary about getting to walk in the Pilgrims' footsteps on a day that otherwise goes unnoticed by everyone around us. We swear that someday before we move we will visit the Pilgrim archives to see if we're related to the Pilgrims. It was especially cool to get to share it with Mom and Dad, who my siblings were kind enough to share with us for the holiday. I spent a good chunk of the service having to feed Avery in the bathroom, but Dad took over after a while and stood with her at the back of the church.

As it happens, Dad had one of the consummate Dutch experiences while walking three-week-old Avery around the back of the church. An older Dutch woman approached him to coo over the baby. At that moment he happened to have Avery up on his shoulder, gently bouncing her. Like any Dutchwoman worth her salt, she couldn't resist conveying her wisdom and passing her judgment. "You know," she informed the pediatrician and emergency room physician who has testified in child abuse cases, "bouncing a baby like that damages their brain."

I have a little too much of the Dutch in me because I know I would've given her the deep satisfaction of engaging her; I have already run that futile gauntlet in numerous instances in which my childrearing was brought into issue by complete strangers in this country. My father is a far better person than I. His response was something along the lines of a wide-eyed, "Really? Oh my! I'd better be really careful, then."

Unfortunately we hadn't tried to procure a turkey before Leiden, so we were left to seek one out at the largest grocery store in Utrecht at about 4 p.m. on Thanksgiving day. Of course, it's not like Utrechtians are all out there beating down the doors for turkeys or anything... So Jeff and I went into the Albert Heijn and sought poultry. I took my usual tack of searching quietly amongst the refrigerator cases, but he took the bull by the horns and made the most of his Dutch language classes by approaching the guy with the big chef hat behind all the roasting chickens and asking, "Heeft u een hele kalkoen?" (Do ya have a whole turkey?) Despite Jeff's impeccable (?) Dutch, the gent responded in English, "Oh, are you celebrating Thanksgiving? Sorry, we don't have any left." So we got a big roasting chicken instead.

At least Mom brought us both pumpkin and Crisco, so we had a real honest-to-gosh punkin pie with homemade crust to save Thanksgiving from culinary ignominy and prove that a holiday ain't a holiday without Mom.