I decided to stay in Santiago for the holidays, making it the first year I’d be without my family for Thanksgiving and Christmas. As the weather heats up here in South America, the summer sun is hardly a sign of the season for eating feasts and decorating houses and singing carols.

So, I thought just maybe the holidays would slip by, unnoticed — without that twinge that reminds you how homesick you really are. And as Thanksgiving inched forward in a country that doesn’t celebrate it, the day really was merely a label on my U.S.-made calendar. But that just didn’t feel right. And it made me feel that inevitable twinge.

So, instead of letting it slip by, unnoticed — the sweet boyfriend that he is promised to bring the holiday here.

 

When preparing for Thanksgiving Dinner, Mark insisted that each of our 18 guests (20 people, counting us!)  have seats at a single table, like a family. I explained that with big families, Thanksgiving means grabbing every chair you can find and spreading out between the “dining room table, the table on the patio and the kids table.” Some people would even be relegated to eating dinner on a TV tray propped up in front of the couch. Mark would have no such thing. And with that stubbornness, the quest for a table for 20 was born.

Mark researched where he could buy wood boards, calculated the lengths necessary and how they should be cut so they could fit in the car. He purchased the boards and gave the dimensions in Spanish to the store employees. He purchased other wood pieces, which he would use for support in connecting everything. He loaded all eight boards, which add up to 5 meters in length, into the car.

I had one job: Hold the shopping cart still. It was full of six boards that awkwardly stacked and towered out of the trolley we would use to carry the boards to the apartment. Mark needed to reach in the car to unpack the final two pieces.

Bam!

And then came the tears. The six boards of wood fell from the cart, toppling onto my sandal-clad foot in a crash that spewed a cloud of sawdust and pieces of wood up into the air. I was in pain, but worried and apologizing for breaking the boards. Mark was worried I had broken my toe. After hours of icing, I determined that my little piggy was fine, and I wouldn’t need an uninsured, surely expensive doctor’s visit.

But a week later, the day before the big feast, I found myself in the hospital waiting room.

My bruised toe was fine. Mark’s index finger, however, was three times the size it should be and so full of blood the skin was starting to burst.

At some point while assembling the table, he received a splinter, which he successfully removed (according to the ultrasound), but it had left his tendons and skin infected. He was to take antibiotics, anti-inflammatory medicine and cook Thanksgiving Dinner with a finger splint — doctor’s orders.

Planning a dinner, and table, for 20 is a production, but the challenges didn’t stop there. In fact, that was just the beginning. Turns out, cooking Thanksgiving Dinner in a country that doesn’t know what Thanksgiving is, is the hard part. That means supermarket shelves aren’t stocked with cans of pumpkin for pies, cranberry sauces for dressings or brown sugar for the traditional sweet potato casserole. It even means the meat aisles are without turkeys to roast.

To top it off, the hosts for this Turkey Day had never cooked Thanksgiving Dinner! My boyfriend Mark, who is from New Zealand, had never even eaten a Thanksgiving meal, let alone cooked one. And me, well, I can barely boil noodles without burning them (true story) and it takes me half an hour to cut a single onion (also a true story), so my assistance in the kitchen is more of a handicap than actual help.

But, we were determined to create a Thanksgiving for myself and our friends who were missing their traditional feasts back home.

Mark and I compiled a shopping list, appropriately named “The biggest shopping list ever” and got to work on it about three weeks before the big feast. On a scavenger hunt through Santiago, I visited specialty cooking stores to collect some of those hard-to-find items, Mark ordered a turkey online and we concocted substitution ingredients, not willing to cross off traditional treats altogether.

We rehydrated packages of Craisins as a base for cranberry sauce (although Chile is apparently a large producer of cranberries, the fruit is seemingly impossible to find in stores). We whipped up homemade meringue instead of marshmallows to top the sweet potatoes. We used a variety of Chilean cheeses for my family’s favorite recipe, cheddar cheese potato casserole (like cranberries, cheddar is also impossible to find). We roasted the turkey in an oven without a temperature setting (typical in Chile). We prepared all this and more in a kitchen as wide as my closet (also typical in Chile…maybe because they don’t have Thanksgiving!).

By some miracle, the results were Thanksgiving food coma-inducing delicious! As we mingled around appetizers and ate dinner, we even watched the traditional Macy’s Day parade and Thanksgiving Day football game (Thank you Internet!).

The Menu

Our wonderful guests brought dozens of tasty dishes (which I’m sure were not without their own battle stories) to round out this perfect Thanksgiving Day menu.
All in all, we feasted on the following:

Appetizers:
-Deviled eggs
-Veggies and hummus
-Bruchetta
-Crackers and cheese

Dinner:
-18 pounds of turkey
-Stuffing
-4 pounds of sweet potato casserole
-10 pounds of potatoes: mashed and cheesy casserole
-Candied carrots roasted on the barbecue
-Roasted asparagus and green beans
-Salad
-3 dozen pieces of bread and rolls
-Cranberry sauce
-Gravy

Drinks:
-18 bottles of Chilean wine
-Various soft drinks

Dessert:
-Cherry pie
-Apple crumble
-Chocolate fudge cake
-Cookies
-Muffins
-Fruit salad
-Ice cream: vanilla, chocolate and raspberry

Someone semi-jokingly suggested we go around the table to say what we’re thankful for and the rest of the group heartily agreed. So that’s what we did after the full five-minute period of silence while everyone inhaled their food.

The sentiments were beautiful, even making some of us a bit teary-eyed.

To sum it up, we’re grateful to be in Chile. Most of us are involved in the Hash House Harriers, so we’re grateful for that, too. But most importantly, we’re grateful for each other — “a group of givers,” “accepting and welcoming,” “crazy, crazy, crazy” — family.

The fact is: Living the ex-pat life is a complicated dichotomy that only us ex-pats can really understand. It’s uniquely life-changing while also being a completely challenging experience. And that duality is something that each of us inevitably bond over in our quest to find some piece of home while living abroad. But in that search for a sense of belonging in a country and culture so different than our own, we sometimes forget that this, too, can be our home, our family.

While sitting at the head of a table for 20 — looking across at this wonderful, worldly group of friends, listening to all the things that make them thankful — I realized: This is my home and family while I’m on this crazy adventure ride. And to have them by my side is truly something to be thankful for.

—JDF