Turkey without a parade

Holding onto Thanksgiving and its memories

We didn’t celebrate the Fourth of July this year because it was just Tuesday in France. We missed Labor Day, didn’t even realize Columbus Day had passed, and ignored Washington’s Birthday and Memorial Day. We did, however, mark France’s Fête Nationale (what Americans call Bastille Day) with a little barbeque. 

The French do patriotic holidays (VE Day, July 14th and Armistice Day) the religious ones (Easter Sunday, Christmas Day, Ascension Day, Assumption, All Saints’ Day, Pentecost), the usuals (New Year’s Day, Labor Day), plus a few extras (Easter Monday, Pentecost Monday, and in Alsace-Lorraine, Good Friday and Boxing Day.) 

If any of these celebrations fall on Monday or Friday, the French combine the days on either side to faire le pont – make the bridge between the holiday and weekend – and, voila, extra days off!

So, we’re not hurting for holidays. 

I am conflicted, though, between the value of integration and shared experience that comes with adopting French holidays, and the bittersweet practice of letting go of traditional American celebrations. I can easily live without Presidents’ Day, and Halloween hasn’t been the same since my mom made me wear a winter coat under my princess costume. But I worry about Thanksgiving. The French just don’t have anything like it.

Some Americans who have moved abroad simply ignore the day and, as the Brits say, carry on. Others mark it with a typically French meal, including foie gras and oysters. I see their points: Why get all twisted up trying to completely replicate a tradition of a country we no longer live in?Which is more important, integrating or honoring old traditions? Can we just do both? 

I’m up for the challenge of celebrating one of the most American holidays in a land where cranberries are nearly impossible to find before Christmas, there is no parade, and the notion of putting marshmallows on sweet potatoes makes the citizenry gag. Last year’s Thanksgiving was lovely, except for that mishap between Celsius and Fahrenheit on the meat thermometer. What really knocks the wind from beneath my turkey wings is that Thanksgiving in France – much like the Fourth of July – is just another workday. It just doesn’t feel very festive when the view from our window is of our neighbors running to catch the Route 11 bus to work. 

Our French-inspired Thanksgiving table

There is a certain fellowship in sharing a day off and a set of honored traditions with the entire country. I always loved the quiet holiday mornings with hardly any traffic, neighbors picking up the paper in their pajamas and stopping to say hello during the morning dog walk. Football is on the TV, fancy appetizers and special cocktails are on the table and the gravy comes in two varieties: with guts and without.

Shared experience is what made it easier this year to celebrate July 14 instead of July 4. (Plus, sorry America, the French have a way better National Anthem.) Losing that communal atmosphere of Thanksgiving – and the ability to watch American football –could have the power to sideline Thanksgiving.

(Remarkably, even if Thanksgiving disappears, I will not have to live without Black Friday. They don’t observe our special Thursday, yet the French do – wholly and enthusiastically – observe the yearly holiday-adjacent Black Friday sales event. I have even seen ads for “Black Week,” “Black November,” and, inexplicably, “White Friday.”)

I am determined not to completely let go of Thanksgiving, in spite of having to swap IKEA’s lingonberry jam for cranberry relish. 

Even though it’s largely based on myth, Thanksgiving seems more enduring in my memory than Christmas. The Thanksgiving dinners Don and I spent with my mom are the most vivid. They might not have been as raucous and spirited as some of the big family affairs, but the years she lived next door to us – even those when she was very ill – were my favorite. Not only did we have many laughs with Mimi, but we feasted on the traditional food I grew up with. Nothing – and I’m including whatever perfect holiday dish you’ve got going on – can compare to my mother’s stuffing.

Not my mother’s stuffing.

I haven’t been able to replicate it all in France, but I’m not enough of a purist to fret about substitutions and workarounds. Close enough will do. 

I couldn’t find those soft stuffing cubes my mother used, so I made my own with brioche-style sliced bread from the supermarket. Superior! Whole turkeys, or even a bone-in breast (couronne de dinde), are scarce this time of year because French farmers time their sale to Christmas, not some random Thursday in November. Just as well. A whole turkey probably wouldn’t fit in my oven anyway and the breast that we enjoyed didn’t produce an overwhelming amount of leftovers.

I’ve never been a big fan of pumpkin or apple pie, so I’m fine with leaving dessert to the people who make some of the world’s best sweets: patisserie chefs. This year it was a sinful raspberry-chocolate cake topped with macarons. 

France offers so many ways to elevate the traditional American Thanksgiving dinner. 

There’s the wine and the cheese. Red wines from Bordeaux, white from Sancerre. Chevre from the Loire Valley and Époisses from Burgundy. 

Root vegetables here should have their own TV show. They are fresh, gorgeous and tastier than anything I’ve ever bought at the ShopRite. In a custom that’s so French, many of the fat red beets are sold already cooked, a tradition that some pin to WWII, when energy conservation inspired roasting them in bulk for the whole village.  

Market haul: turnips, yellow beets, potatoes, rose-colored onions

There are varieties of mushrooms I never knew existed. They added an uncommon richness to last year’s stuffing. If you want a little veggie-and-dip nosh before dinner, you’d be smart to go heavy on the celery – it has more flavor than I ever imagined celery could have. 

Don made only two requests this year: mashed potatoes and gravy. Mashed potatoes are far superior in France, not due to the spuds, but because the butter here is imported directly from heaven, where fat little cherubs generously sprinkle delicious large crystals of salt into the rich yellow bricks. The gravy required some creativity since I had to make it without drippings. I used a recipe that suggested toasting the flour and butter as a substitute for the rich flavor. They had me at “butter.”

Butter of the gods

One of the brightest additions to the meal this year, though, was our first holiday guest: an American friend who moved to Rennes a few months after us. She is funny and kind and has an amazing dog. She also brought the cake! 

Her presence reminded me that the whole point of Thanksgiving isn’t about the perfect candied sweet potatoes or cranberry relish. It’s about using the ritual of a shared meal, albeit lingonberried, as a way to pause to experience and express gratitude.

In that spirit, thank you for reading.