Americans celebrate Thanksgiving on the 4th Thursday of November. With the holiday just days away, American expatriates here in Budapest may find themselves scrambling for a way to celebrate the earliest American Federal holiday. My suggestion: go to Pozsonyi Kisvendéglő and have the duck, it's pretty close to a traditional Thanksgiving meal and you'll be just as stuffed. However, if you'd rather not spend the holiday sullenly stuffing face alone, and actually enjoy sappily celebrating being overly thankful with friends and family, be my guest. Sure, we all may see Thanksgiving as a grandiose excuse to make a massive meal, shovel it in, then stumble to the sofa to watch American football the rest of the day while in a tryptophan-induced near-coma. To that I say, do some research about actual Thanksgiving. Native Americans were slaughtered.
A 1895 New York Times article stated, "New York celebrated her first Thanksgiving Day [...] in 1644, [...] the Dutch citizens of New York killed nearly 600 Indians and then marched home and 'cheerfully' ate their Thanksgiving Day dinners." The first Thanksgiving, which took place almost a quarter decade before this incident, supposedly celebrated a successful harvest season and the Pilgrims and Native Americans harmonious friendship. So if the hatred was still there 23 years later, one could bet that few puritanical pilgrims were sitting down with "them Injins" to gnaw on some turkeys.
One thing I'm reveling in while safe and sound here in Budapest: NO BLACK FRIDAY. For those of you unfamiliar; no this is not a racially slanderous day. It's the day after Thanksgiving where in America people start their official Christmas shopping and are insane about it. Just about every retailer in the U S of A has a ludicrous deal running, which they wildly advertise. In turn that forces people to camp outside of stores, waiting for the doors to open at some ungodly hour of the morning. All this just to end up getting scratched, kicked, stampeded, scraped, burned, stabbed, shot, et cetera by other rabid deal-seekers.So be thankful this Thanksgiving you don't have to deal with inane questions from your folks, nagging in-laws, an annoying kid sister, or fighting for the last Tickle Me Elmo or that plasma flat screen you want to snag for your fiancé for x-mas.
Jacob P.
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Very glad to have left behind the lemming-fest of Black Friday this year. Just ordinary Xmas shopping for a month or so. And the nice Xmas markets - was so much more pleasant than fighting a load of shopping zombies!