A Happy Thanksgiving from Ireland
IT’S been a journey of the heart, these last nearly 30 years of Thanksgiving celebrations in the heart of Ireland, and the USA’s national autumn holiday has travelled well. Celebrating an ‘Irish Thanksgiving’ has led to changes and tweaks, moving the weekday celebration to the fourth Saturday of November being one but always improving on the last as it should be while always welcomed when that time of year rolls around and everyone there from near and far can give thanks for the bounty that has been.
Thanksgiving cranberry sauce starts with three main ingredients, a sweet apple, a good Port and the main event, fresh cranberries
In many ways a harvest celebration, we have the USA’s ‘Great Liberator’ Abraham Lincoln to thank for making Thanksgiving a national holiday. America was deep in civil war at the first ‘official’ Thanksgiving holiday, and the 16th President wanted to mark the achievement of setbacks and success over the 100 years since the country was founded while remembering its birth and offering respite from the horrors of a divided nation. Mr Lincoln founded the fourth Thursday in November as the annual date of the national celebration, reputedly to give the largely agrarian society a break that didn’t fall on a Sunday, an official – back then – day of rest. The plan worked, and in more than 160 years of Thanksgiving, a harvest festival giving thanks for the bounty of the outgoing season, falls only second to Christmas.
New to the Thanksgiving table and a welcome addition, Sweet Potato Casserole and it’s gluten free
The essentials of a thanksgiving harvest feast, cranberries from the New England bogs, vegetables including pumpkins and potatoes, squash and carrots as well as corn and bread – the bread crumbled and dry for the basis of stuffing – and of course the turkey itself all form part or whole of the Thanksgiving feast. Often what appears on the Thanksgiving table is down to choices made by the at-home chef and over the years pumpkin pie, pecan pie and pumpkin cheesecake have dominated the desserts here, and everything is gluten-free.
Cranberry sauce and sausage meet don’t go together, but both are essential ingredients for the Thanksgiving table
More importantly, Thanksgiving has always been a time to give thanks with family while welcoming friends and even strangers to the table, and the same has been remembered and celebrated here in Ireland. Government officials, friends over many years have asked what day in the Irish calendar year might be comparable for giving thanks: Australia and Canada both have their own national versions of Thanksgiving so the USA isn’t unique in the celebration, perhaps just the most well-known.
Mr Lincoln chose the day not just to give farmers a break, but to look back as a nation on the achievements of the previous 100 years as cause for celebration. While his plan – to bring unity to a war-torn USA or perhaps just to remember that divided, we could not stand – was at first barely a blip on the battlefield, people remembered and the celebration took root.
A well laden Thanksgiving table, stuffing with sausage meat, carrots and sweet corn, mashed potatoes with cream and cheddar cheeses, sliced turkey, cranberry sauce, plenty of gravy, sweet potato casserole, pumpkin and pecan pie
As for my friends in government, it is up to my adopted country to agree on when thanks might be given: Bealtaine, when new life celebrates the end of winter; Samhain, when the death of the old year is near. Both have been suggested, but it will take a nation to go along with it and in one American expat’s opinion, St Patrick’s Day is already taken.
