Last weekend I was invited by President Connie Book and the Global Education Center at Elon to an early Thanksgiving dinner for international students and scholars. The event was a great way for US colleagues to be able to explain why Thanksgiving is celebrated to many people for whom this celebration is not familiar. Normally celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November, this particular dinner party was early, but this worked well for me as I was pleased to be able to attend – I suspect otherwise my US travel would have meant I’d have missed it.
There are lots of variations in the accounts of the first Thanksgiving, but essentially early settlers in Virginia had a good harvest and apparently shared this harvest in a feast with native Americans. There are many critics of this version of events, but modern day Thanksgiving seems to emphasise family getting together to share a turkey dinner and pumpkin pie and articulating what they are thankful for. The picture shows me with my housemates Kristen and Babu at the Elon international thanksgiving dinner. We will see if there are any variations on this explanation of thanksgiving, when I go to Peter and Sara Felten’s for the real thing in a fortnight (…a turn of phrase I have just learned is considered British English in the USA – they don’t use fortnight or fortnightly).
