Eye of Modok

There are a few holidays I like to keep celebrating even though we are far from the US - Halloween, Christmas, Easter and Thanksgiving. We certainly have our own customs when it comes to exactly how we celebrate. We don’t strictly adhere to traditions in a religious sense, though we still like to convey the overall theme, filtered through our unique blend of spirituality.

There are plenty of places to choose from to celebrate the holidays, mostly hotels catering to foreign guests. Thanksgiving is the one holiday that seems to be abnormally represented with many restaurants offering their own feasts. This year we were thinking of forgoing the traditional turkey dinner and join some friends at a Chinese restaurant where half the money would get you twice the feast but the kids wouldn’t hear of it. They would not be denied one of their few American holidays so, turkey it was.

One huge difference in the way Thanksgiving is celebrated by the expat community in Beijing is probably only one tenth of the celebrants are actually Americans. People from all nationalities happily join in the feast, no doubt the reason why nearly every restaurant offering turkey dinners sells out well in advance. Most countries have some form of Thanksgiving but the whole turkey dinner thing seems very American to me. That is certainly not the case here!

I saw a few people complaining in a forum that celebrating Thanksgiving in the US is evil, as to do so is to condone the racial genocide perpetrated against the natives at the time. To them, I would say, “You really don’t get it.” If there is any day to put aside hatred based on ancestral sins or slights, I would say this is the day. It was wonderful for me to hear the list of things my kids were thankful for, once I got them started. It is much more natural for them to list the things they want or the things they don’t like than to contemplate the things for which they should be grateful. Once they got started though, they had a lot of fun with it. (Hint, hint to you people mentioned above who take yourself far to seriously.) Thanksgiving is certainly not an American thing. It is part of being a decent human being.