(Not) Home for the Holidays: Thanksgiving in Istanbul

Basically you have three choices about holidays when you are on the road. (1) You can ignore them; (2) you can celebrate them in the closest way possible to how you traditionally celebrated them; or (3) you can recreate their spirit in a new way.

The first approach – ignoring – is the easiest. American Thanksgiving is a perfect example: no one outside the U.S. celebrates this holiday. (Canadians celebrate Thanksgiving but we’re not in Canada, and also, they celebrate it in October with different traditions.) So there is no indication that it’s even a holiday most places in the world.

The second approach takes the most effort, and involves serious risk of disappointment. We have yet to see cranberries in Istanbul, let alone cranberry sauce, let alone gelled cranberry sauce in the can god intended for it! Ditto for sweet potatoes and, ironically, turkeys. And we won’t even mention that John grew up enjoying Italian Thanksgivings, where there was plenty of Italian food as well as the whole turkey business. But even if we could find everything, it still wouldn’t be the same.

The third approach takes the most imagination. You have to think about what the holiday really means to you, and then how you can recreate that feeling. That’s what we usually try to do.

Holiday Traditions

As it happens, Thanksgiving is our very favourite holiday. It’s the only major secular holiday in the U.S., and we love its emphasis on gratitude and spending time with loved ones. We knew this was one of the things we’d be giving up, and not just during holidays. Luckily, we lived through two-plus years of a pandemic, so we’ve had some experience with this one. We have been – if we do say so ourselves – pretty good about keeping in touch with family while we are away, and it’s never been easier. So we’ll be checking in with everyone.

Favourite Thanksgiving Traditions

Another thing we love about Thanksgiving is the abundance, a large table packed full of delicious food. We know it’s not about the food (though we’ll deny saying so!). It’s about the hospitality and coming together to share. Funnily enough, most days in Istanbul are like this for us, even though we are strangers here. Just about every restaurant we go to, however humble, welcomes us as if we are best friends, and serves us an enormous amount of fantastic food made with care and beautifully presented. Despite the fact that we still haven’t made much progress in Turkish, they make us feel as if we are in their home. And sometimes, a restaurant patron who speaks some English will express to us the owner’s delight at our presence. So we are feeling the love.

We also like the fact that Thanksgiving is inclusive and adaptable, able to accommodate new things on top of the basics: brussels sprouts or green beans? [The first, obviously – are you crazy? But-] Why not both? It allows for the blending of traditions so that everyone has something comforting and maybe something new too. The best part of how we’re living at the moment is precisely this familiarity-plus-novelty: we can reinvent ourselves every few months, in ways small and large, trying out the idea of being morning people or drinking beer or taking post-prandial walks. If we like it, it sticks, and if not, we move on.

And Some New Thanksgiving Traditions

So: no turkey for us. Which is just fine. Instead, in a nice blend of universal and particular, we’ve roasted a chicken with figs, pomegranate molasses, cinnamon, and sumac! We’ve also thrown some potatoes and carrots in there. It will be just the two of us, but that’s been true sometimes in the past as well. We confess: we miss John’s amazing chocolate-bourbon-pecan pie, but it’s not like we really need the sugar.

We often go see a movie at some point Thanksgiving weekend. We’ll probably do that here as well. We’re not American football fans, so we don’t miss that (though there is the World Cup!). Another tradition we do not miss is the official start of holiday shopping. Alas, that’s the one thing we can’t get away from: Black Friday is now a thing everywhere there are business owners, usually with no sense of its original meaning (the time of the year when stores moved ‘into the black’ financially). Horrifyingly, we have now seen Black Friday Weekend and Black Friday Week: a whole succession of Fridays, we suppose, and their concomitant sales. Much of this capitalist joy/frenzy is lost on us, given our minimalist vibe. And we have never gone into any store at all the day after Thanksgiving. (Ok: maybe once, to get a Kitchen Aid mixer… but we really needed one!)