Thanksgiving

This is a Thanksgiving like no other I've had before. I didn't sleep in late or spend the day cooking, and my evening won't be spent eating stuffing and yams and pumpkin pie with my family. I had a Thursday morning just like usual, waking up in time to attend first my Russian lesson, then my ballet technique class. My lunch break has passed, and I'm now waiting for my turn to come to dance in a run-through for an upcoming show, which I hope will end in time for me to make it to the Mariinsky Theater to watch a performance of the ballet Raymonda.

My favorite part of Thanksgiving is the morning and afternoon spent in the kitchen with my family as we cook the foods that we'll eat for dinner later. As the house begins to smell of bursting cranberries, spices, and roasting vegetables, the warm and fragrant air leaves fog on the cool glass of the windows all through our home. I'll help chop and mash the potatoes, but my mom is the expert, and it's her who decides when they're whipped enough and have just the right amount of butter, milk, and salt. My dad is in charge of the preparation of our vegetarian turkey roast. Since we haven't got a real turkey to stuff, we cook and eat our stuffing separately. My aunt bakes the stuffing in a muffin tin so that everybody can have  lots of the crunchy edge part and nobody is left without only the soft insides. At some point during the afternoon, she'll arrive with the almost baked stuffing muffins, only in need of a few more minutes in the oven to make the tops perfectly browned. While my mom fills a casserole dish with shredded carrots, sautéed onions, and melted butter, layering cheddar cheese and crushed saltines overtop, I'll make cranberry sauce. Sometimes my brother will even take a break from his computer games and venture into the kitchen to help with this.

Cranberry sauce is the only usual Thanksgiving food that I'll be eating today. I wanted a little bit of familiarity in my holiday, since Thanksgiving is so much a holiday seeped in familial and cultural traditions, especially related to the food that is eaten. There aren't any other holidays commonly celebrated in the United States that have such a recognizable and predictable meal associated with them; people all seem to have their own Christmas and Easter dinners, but the Thanksgiving meals on the tables of a lot of families look very much the same. I also wanted to share a little bit of Thanksgiving with my classmates and friends here, so I made enough to share and have been handing out little tupperwares of cranberry sauce all day.

Though I didn't get to celebrate my Thanksgiving as I usually do, the most important parts of the holiday were still very much a part of my day. I shared time and food with friends, and I have been thinking about all I have to be grateful for even more than I would have if I were caught up in my usual Thanksgiving festivities.

I feel that I have more to be grateful for this year than ever before. I am thankful for the opportunity that I've been given to spend the year here, for all of the people who helped me in any way to get here, and for the new friends I've met. The fact that I had a ballet class that I needed to wake up for this morning is something for which I am extremely grateful.

Being so far away from home is difficult because it means that there are many people I care about who I will not be able to spend time with today. I am feeling especially grateful for my family and my friends in the United States because of this distance. Being apart makes me realize just how much I value, miss, and care about you. It reminds me not to take for granted the time I have with the ones I love. Having that perspective is something to be grateful for.