Thanksgiving: The Importance Of Thanksgiving In Pop Culture

There are things in life that we long to do, in my case I yearned to make an American style Thanksgiving meal for my family. After twelve years in the United States our family had yet to make a turkey and do the whole Thanksgiving shebang. My longing for this feast wasn’t because of my infatuation with food; it was due to the depiction of thanksgiving in pop culture. There is something about the movies that make it seem like celebrating Thanksgiving was required and made you truly American; I wanted to be truly American. Thanksgiving 2015 was the year that I took it upon myself to go through with making thanksgiving dinner; I prepared everything in advance from googling how to make the best consistency mashed potatoes to going out and buying all my ingredients well ahead of the shopping rush around Thanksgiving Day. A critical detail I failed to catch through my extensive google queries about preparing a Thanksgiving meal was about defrosting the turkey. My mom had said to move it into the refrigerator to thaw 4 days in advance however due to my stupidity I listened to a yahoo answers post that said a turkey would defrost in one night and ignored her advice, after all what would she, a Nepali

The biggest lesson was humility, even though I feel like I know more than they do because of their inability to speak English fluently and my “superior” internet research skills, I proudly admit that they know far more than I do and no amount of preparation can ever be enough. I was also able to feel more at ease with how American I was through this experience. I wasn’t devastated by my failure, well my stomach was but my mind was at ease. At that time I didn’t understand why I was so relaxed about my failure at Thanksgiving but now I understand it, maybe subconsciously I understood what I understand now; you don’t have to do any specific thing to be American, in fact you don’t have to try, you just are