The Continuance of the Holiday Season: Thanksgiving Edition

I was a little nervous as to what we would do for Thanksgiving here in Korea since it is one of my favorite holidays because of the family time and food.  I also knew we had to work on Thanksgiving day until 7:30 since they do not celebrate this day as a holiday.  I started by making my children partake in my crafting hobby.  We made turkeys to decorate the room or so this was my excuse to use them to make my thanksgiving cards.  On Thanksgiving day we made kimchi in class.  Kimchi is a side dish that Koreans eat at every meal.  If you hear that it is fermented cabbage you might get grossed out but it is actually quite tasty.  A few months ago we went on a field trip to plant cabbages at a farm and then we went and picked them.  Then in class we rubbed all the cabbage with this red paste.  This was definitely something I was not used to doing on Thanksgiving, but I guess "when in Korea".   We knew we could not just settle for making cabbage for this wonderful holiday so some friends and I decided we needed to devise a plan so that we could make it feel like we were home for the holiday.  We decided to plan a progressive Thanksgiving meal on the following Saturday.  We found out the US military base sold cooked turkeys and we have a friend at work that has access to the base so we could check turkey off the list.  Now the rest was going to be interesting due to the lack of ovens in our apartment and lack of American cooking ingredients in this country.  All the foreign staff (yes we are the foreigners) signed up to make dishes to take to the massive meal that we planned.  We started the night with appetizers at Alison's house.  We had a wide variety of appetizers including deviled eggs, veggie trays, fruit platters, chips & dip and cheese and crackers.  After we stuffed our faces there we moved onto Amie's house for dinner.  Amie is a fantastic cook and really helped with pulling off her own versions of our favorite dishes. For dinner we had turkey, stuffing, veggies, rolls, mashed potatoes , gravy and cranberry sauce.  We even watched an American football game while eating dinner.  We then moved on to my house for desserts.  Here we had quite the variety of desserts including apple pie, pumpkin pie, pumpkin bread, banana cream pie and chocolate peanut butter pie.  We even had festive cocktails of hot buttered rum and well plenty of wine.  After we were all in our food comas we played a game of movie charades and had our photo booth, which is a necessity at each party.  It was a tight squeeze in our Korean apartments but we managed to house 25-30 people for the progressive dinner.  It was so wonderful to have such a great group of friends to act as family during this holiday.  I am very thankful for the friends I have made here to make my experience that much better.  I am also very thankful for the family and friends back home for all their love and support.  This Thanksgiving is definitely one I will never forget and so glad we could once again bring American tradition to Korea!