Giving Thanks
The Dominion Post
Thanksgiving Day 2005
Today is the day when Americans around the world - including those in New Zealand - stop to give thanks, eat too much and blob out. Kim Griggs finds out about the attractions of Thanksgiving.
"What I love about Thanksgiving," says Wellingtonian Tommy Honey, who hosts a huge Thanksgiving dinner every year, "is that it's a process, not only of having the meal but preparing and serving it and sharing it."
This year will be the 21st time that Mr Honey has hosted dinner on the fourth Thursday of November. His first dinner had one turkey shared between eight guests. Tonight, 100 or so guests will enjoy two turkeys - and much much more.
The American tradition of Thanksgiving originates from the meal the Pilgrims held to celebrate a successful harvest after their first tough year in the New World.
According to lore, the festivities - the Pilgrims invited along their native American neighbours - lasted three days.
These days, Thanksgiving in the United States lasts about as long - it's a long weekend, which gives many Americans the chance to travel home to visit families, spend Thursday cooking and eating, and the rest of the weekend holed up watching sport and eating leftovers.
Mr Honey's first experience of Thanksgiving was when he spent the holiday with American relatives in Delaware. "I just got a sense of the occasion."
Back home in New Zealand, a modest meal the following year has become an annual event.
Tonight, Mr Honey's 70-square-metre house will burst at the seams with two serving stations, outdoor eating areas, and people squeezing into every possible nook to balance their plate.
"I have this dream of designing a house that's just one really big table for Thanksgiving and a few little rooms off it, if I was to indulge myself."
To contend with feeding such a huge crowd he's now got the entire evening finely tuned, with spreadsheets allocating food, dividing volunteers into various teams (cooking, washing up, serving and carving) and has a runsheet of the evening.
One year, when he was still doing all the preparation and cooking himself, the meal was very late, "so now I'm a bit of a stickler for the timing of the meal, particularly with this number of people. And I think I'm getting pretty good at it."
His planning starts about six weeks out, compiling the menu, inviting guests and building up the various teams. For those unable to help on the day, there is an option of providing food, so a guest could be allocated the task of dropping off 10 rock melons or two bunches of celery or a sack of potatoes.
"I love the days leading up to Thanksgiving because I get home and there?s all this largesse sitting outside my door as I haul it in, tick it off my list and put it into the appropriate place and get it ready."
While Mr Honey always serves turkey - it's de rigueur - he has occasionally improvised on the way it is presented, including one year when he did turkey sandwiches - "which I thought was quite innovative but was a deep disappointment for most of the guests," he recalls.
"I didn't find out for several years because people were too polite to point out that they had stopped eating for the day and went home with just a sand sandwich in their stomach. So my attempts to vary the cuts of turkey have receded. Now I'm back to the full beast."
Tonight, guests will feast on a three course meal featuring soups, vegetable dishes and salads, banana cream and pecan pies and the centrepieces, roast and barbecued turkeys.
"Thanksgiving," says Mr Honey, "has to be filling. It's not a light night."
While here Thanksgiving occurs as New Zealand starts to ready itself for summer, in the US, Thanksgiving weekend is the signal for the beginning of the winter holiday season.
Decorations go up on houses, Christmas shopping starts in earnest and Santa's participation in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade in New York sets the festive tone.
For Wellington-based American Maureen Hickey, Thanksgiving in upstate New York was always marked by a big family gathering at her home, a groaning table, and entertainment by an elderly uncle, who had been an accompanist for silent movies.
"We had a piano at the house and he would come and he would play. That was the big thing at our house. He would play the piano and all my grandparents would sing along with all his songs. That was what was special about it for our house because our Uncle Ray would come."
At home in Oregon, newly arrived US ambassador's wife Gail McCormick and her husband Bill host a traditional Thanksgiving meal, with a couple of turkeys, a traditional giblet stuffing, cranberry sauce, root vegetables, and the requisite pumpkin and pecan pies.
"In our family Bill does all of the cooking," says Mrs McCormick. "I do the table and the flowers and decorations. Bill's in charge of the food but we will share on the shopping. We usually have 15 to 20 people for dinner, our relatives."
This year, the ambassador has had to delegate the cooking to the chef at their residence, though an allowance for the ambassador's interest has been made - "he did tell Bill that he would let him do the peeling".
And the McCormicks' guests, US Fulbright scholars in New Zealand, will be invited to play sports on the lawn, rather than watch sport on television.
Despite its roots in Pilgrim fare, Thanksgiving is one of those festivities that can be adapted - for instance, the German heritage of Mr McCormick's business partner Doug Schmick gives him the leeway to include sauerkraut on the Thanksgiving table.
Those culinary permutations are no more obvious than in the southern states. There, a whole new way of cooking turkey - deep-frying - has developed.
Turkeys cooked this way are boiled in large kettles filled with peanut oil, heated from below. The result, says Eric Holowacz, an import to Wellington from South Carolina, is "a delicious turkey with a crispy and sealed outside, and a perfect, tender inside".
The deep -frying tends to be done outside, and Southerners will often continue an outdoor Thanksgiving theme by having friends over in the evening for an "oyster roast".
For this, a wheelbarrow load of oysters will be "roasted" open between wet sacks on the embers of a fire. Eating is not a formal affair - a gardening glove protects the oysterholding hand, while the other hand shucks the oyster meat.
"It goes late into the night. The only light around the whole place is the fire and sometimes you have floodlights from somebody's house but it's kind of a dark, smoky, communal, really cool environment," says Mr Holowacz.
In Wellington, Thanksgiving celebrations tend to include more friends than family, but the essence of the tradition translates across the Pacific.
Says Mr Honey: "It's about prosperity, being able to eat and share through food. As a holiday or festival, the idea of sharing through food is what drew me to it, because I love cooking and I love my friends.
"And to just stop once a year and give thanks for existing."
Thanksgiving Day 2005
Today is the day when Americans around the world - including those in New Zealand - stop to give thanks, eat too much and blob out. Kim Griggs finds out about the attractions of Thanksgiving.
"What I love about Thanksgiving," says Wellingtonian Tommy Honey, who hosts a huge Thanksgiving dinner every year, "is that it's a process, not only of having the meal but preparing and serving it and sharing it."
This year will be the 21st time that Mr Honey has hosted dinner on the fourth Thursday of November. His first dinner had one turkey shared between eight guests. Tonight, 100 or so guests will enjoy two turkeys - and much much more.
The American tradition of Thanksgiving originates from the meal the Pilgrims held to celebrate a successful harvest after their first tough year in the New World.
According to lore, the festivities - the Pilgrims invited along their native American neighbours - lasted three days.
These days, Thanksgiving in the United States lasts about as long - it's a long weekend, which gives many Americans the chance to travel home to visit families, spend Thursday cooking and eating, and the rest of the weekend holed up watching sport and eating leftovers.
Mr Honey's first experience of Thanksgiving was when he spent the holiday with American relatives in Delaware. "I just got a sense of the occasion."
Back home in New Zealand, a modest meal the following year has become an annual event.
Tonight, Mr Honey's 70-square-metre house will burst at the seams with two serving stations, outdoor eating areas, and people squeezing into every possible nook to balance their plate.
"I have this dream of designing a house that's just one really big table for Thanksgiving and a few little rooms off it, if I was to indulge myself."
To contend with feeding such a huge crowd he's now got the entire evening finely tuned, with spreadsheets allocating food, dividing volunteers into various teams (cooking, washing up, serving and carving) and has a runsheet of the evening.
One year, when he was still doing all the preparation and cooking himself, the meal was very late, "so now I'm a bit of a stickler for the timing of the meal, particularly with this number of people. And I think I'm getting pretty good at it."
His planning starts about six weeks out, compiling the menu, inviting guests and building up the various teams. For those unable to help on the day, there is an option of providing food, so a guest could be allocated the task of dropping off 10 rock melons or two bunches of celery or a sack of potatoes.
"I love the days leading up to Thanksgiving because I get home and there?s all this largesse sitting outside my door as I haul it in, tick it off my list and put it into the appropriate place and get it ready."
While Mr Honey always serves turkey - it's de rigueur - he has occasionally improvised on the way it is presented, including one year when he did turkey sandwiches - "which I thought was quite innovative but was a deep disappointment for most of the guests," he recalls.
"I didn't find out for several years because people were too polite to point out that they had stopped eating for the day and went home with just a sand sandwich in their stomach. So my attempts to vary the cuts of turkey have receded. Now I'm back to the full beast."
Tonight, guests will feast on a three course meal featuring soups, vegetable dishes and salads, banana cream and pecan pies and the centrepieces, roast and barbecued turkeys.
"Thanksgiving," says Mr Honey, "has to be filling. It's not a light night."
While here Thanksgiving occurs as New Zealand starts to ready itself for summer, in the US, Thanksgiving weekend is the signal for the beginning of the winter holiday season.
Decorations go up on houses, Christmas shopping starts in earnest and Santa's participation in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade in New York sets the festive tone.
For Wellington-based American Maureen Hickey, Thanksgiving in upstate New York was always marked by a big family gathering at her home, a groaning table, and entertainment by an elderly uncle, who had been an accompanist for silent movies.
"We had a piano at the house and he would come and he would play. That was the big thing at our house. He would play the piano and all my grandparents would sing along with all his songs. That was what was special about it for our house because our Uncle Ray would come."
At home in Oregon, newly arrived US ambassador's wife Gail McCormick and her husband Bill host a traditional Thanksgiving meal, with a couple of turkeys, a traditional giblet stuffing, cranberry sauce, root vegetables, and the requisite pumpkin and pecan pies.
"In our family Bill does all of the cooking," says Mrs McCormick. "I do the table and the flowers and decorations. Bill's in charge of the food but we will share on the shopping. We usually have 15 to 20 people for dinner, our relatives."
This year, the ambassador has had to delegate the cooking to the chef at their residence, though an allowance for the ambassador's interest has been made - "he did tell Bill that he would let him do the peeling".
And the McCormicks' guests, US Fulbright scholars in New Zealand, will be invited to play sports on the lawn, rather than watch sport on television.
Despite its roots in Pilgrim fare, Thanksgiving is one of those festivities that can be adapted - for instance, the German heritage of Mr McCormick's business partner Doug Schmick gives him the leeway to include sauerkraut on the Thanksgiving table.
Those culinary permutations are no more obvious than in the southern states. There, a whole new way of cooking turkey - deep-frying - has developed.
Turkeys cooked this way are boiled in large kettles filled with peanut oil, heated from below. The result, says Eric Holowacz, an import to Wellington from South Carolina, is "a delicious turkey with a crispy and sealed outside, and a perfect, tender inside".
The deep -frying tends to be done outside, and Southerners will often continue an outdoor Thanksgiving theme by having friends over in the evening for an "oyster roast".
For this, a wheelbarrow load of oysters will be "roasted" open between wet sacks on the embers of a fire. Eating is not a formal affair - a gardening glove protects the oysterholding hand, while the other hand shucks the oyster meat.
"It goes late into the night. The only light around the whole place is the fire and sometimes you have floodlights from somebody's house but it's kind of a dark, smoky, communal, really cool environment," says Mr Holowacz.
In Wellington, Thanksgiving celebrations tend to include more friends than family, but the essence of the tradition translates across the Pacific.
Says Mr Honey: "It's about prosperity, being able to eat and share through food. As a holiday or festival, the idea of sharing through food is what drew me to it, because I love cooking and I love my friends.
"And to just stop once a year and give thanks for existing."