Last Saturday I celebrated my first Thanksgiving together with 13 other people form the UU congregation I went to earlier this month. Lynn was organizing it, while somebody else was hosting it. Lynn invited me when I went to the Sunday service earlier this month, and I thought ‘Why not?’ :).

So earlier that morning I went to the market, bought the stuff I needed to make my share in the dishes and started cutting vegetables for a Thai salad with Thai dressing :). I had made it twice earlier, so I was pretty familiar with how I had to make it, but now it was (originally for 21) people… Pretty difficult to judge quantities like that.

At 1 pm I hurriedly…

…left the kitchen to get myself ready to ride to the spot near the highway where somebody was supposed to pick me up. From there we drove to the Hague where we would celebrate. Unfortunately 7 people of one family and a couple of friends couldn’t make it because they had been snowed in due to the extreme weather in the Netherlands last Friday. But nevertheless we all enjoyed ourselves I think :).

Before we started eating we all mentioned some things we were grateful for. I said I was grateful for the fact that my relationship with my father is again healthy because I missed him last year. And I also mentioned that I was glad to have the health to do whatever I want, including running 10 km (6.2 miles) with a housemate.

I had all kinds of stuff that afternoon, ranging from turkey with strawberry sauce to sweet potatoes, stuffing, thai salad (too bad I put too much coriander in it :|) and lemon and pumpkin pie… It was nice to be able to taste some American things that did not came from the category ‘junk food’…

Anyway… At around 7 pm most of us went home. Too bad the daughter of the minister wasn’t there, since she’s the only UU I have met yet that is younger than me. The youngest person besides me at the Thanksgiving was about 32 years old I think. It also wasn’t as special as I had in my skewed mind, it’s basically similar to our Christmas evening. That didn’t prevent me from enjoying myself though ;). I was glad to have been there :).

Till now I haven’t had many religious discussions yet with the people I’ve been meeting, but somewhere in January there’s going to be a debate or discussion or something like that where they will be talking about the principles and purposes of UU, so I hope I can be there to listen. And there’s the December Sunday service next Sunday as well…