Since leaving for college, I have been a diligent practitioner of Thanksgiving. It’s my favorite holiday. I would sooner work on Christmas than on Thanksgiving. All three years of college (and the first year after), I prepared Thanksgiving dinner in dorm kitchens or my first ill-equipped apartment and had high school friends stranded on the east coast over to enjoy. My two years in Ecuador, one of the DEA agents hosted everyone for Thanksgiving, and after spending an awkward few hours enduring the evil eye from someone I denied a visa (who was the mistress of a departed employee) I was ready to NOT do Embassy Thanksgiving for a while…and once I met Sev, we hosted two Thanksgiving blow-outs in Washington with 10 or 11 people both years. I like to take the day off before Thanksgiving and cook ALL. THE. FOOD. for two straight days.
All this to say, I was not super stoked to be doing another Embassy Thanksgiving this year, especially if we weren’t hosting (and therefore not in charge of the guest list). I also spent the three days preceding Thanksgiving totally destroyed by a nasty cold, and was less than thrilled by the prospect of driving 90 minutes home from the villa our friend had rented after a 5 pm dinner.
That said…there couldn’t have been a much better setting for a Thanksgiving dinner than this villa, which was an old stone house with a big walled yard. The house was traditionally and fabulously decorated, and we set up a big long table in the courtyard next to a portable fire pit. That’s right friends, we had Thanksgiving outdoors because the weather in Cyprus is that gorgeous right now. I made gougeres as an appetizer, which no one ate (including me) because there was totally delicious chips and salsa (an extremely rare commodity as it’s not available in fresh or jarred form here) brought by someone else. I did make a pumpkin pie with a speculoos crust and it was totally destroyed by the end of the night.
Neither of us knew any of these people four months ago, but we had a great time nonetheless and we were sad to leave the party at about 9:30 pm to drive back to Nicosia (work the next day and all).
And I’m going to make up for my lack of cooking– and leftovers– by doing Thanksgiving dinner-for-Christmas this year!