Thanksgiving

The American missionaries here celebrate Thanksgiving.  Though we celebrate the holiday, there are certain things that are different because of living overseas.  The main one is that you can’t go to the grocery store to buy a turkey.  But we can order one from the butcher in our village.  He has gotten used to the Americans here coming and ordering turkeys from him this time of the year.  A Hungarian friend said that the butcher told her that he sold 40-some turkeys last year for Thanksgiving.  A long time ago, you would have picked up your turkey with the neck still attached.  When we picked ours up, the neck was cut off and placed inside the turkey, and the giblets and insides had all been taken out.

One interesting thing about getting the turkey was that we didn’t get to decide what size turkey we wanted.  The butcher just said that it would be between 6 and 9 kilograms (13-20 pounds).  He also didn’t tell us how much it would cost.  When Gary went to pick it up, he asked for the smallest turkey he had, and the butcher gave him an 18 pound turkey!  The price was shocking too.

We were glad to have the Custer family join us for Thanksgiving this year. 

My 1st turkey

Some of you may be wondering how I could have gone this long without cooking a turkey.  Before Gary and I got married, we would always be invited to someone else’s house for Thanksgiving. Since we’ve been married, we’ve only been in Hungary for 2 Thanksgivings (this was our 3rd) due to being gone for furloughs and recruiting trips that were over Thanksgiving.

I’m not a huge fan of the traditional Thanksgiving food (LOTS of starches), but the food was good.  Michelle and I spent a long time cooking since everything has to be done from scratch.  She even made the onions from scratch that go on the green bean casserole. 

Gary read a Thanksgiving book to the kids. 

After the book they drew hand turkeys.

It’s fun being able to do more things in regards to holidays as the kids are getting older.  I’m eager to see what all Ethan is able to understand with Advent this year.

There are soooo many things to be thankful to God for.  I’m not even going to begin to write them on this blog or I will be writing for a very long time!