Thanksgiving is exactly that: giving thanks. It's a time for everyone for reflect upon and be thankful for all that they have been blessed with over the past year, in particular the harvest. Of course, this meaning has been lost a little in modern commercialism, but it's still a time for food and family.
Americans commonly trace the origins of the festival to a celebration held in 1621 by the settlers of the Plymouth Colony, in what is now Massachusetts, after their first harvest in the New World. Arriving on the Mayflower in December 1620, the group who would come to be known as the Pilgrims faced a hard winter in a strange land, and only fifty-three of the original 102 passengers survived to see the following autumn. The English colonists invited ninety-one members of the local Wampanoag tribe to celebrate the bountiful harvest with them, and the feast lasted for three days.
Before I came here, I didn't realise that Canada, too, celebrated Thanksgiving. It's not that I thought they didn't; rather that "Thanksgiving" is so American, it just never occurred to me that Canada might do too. But with the two countries sharing a border it's hardly surprising. It's celebrated in pretty much the same way and for the same reasons as in the USA, but is held about six weeks earlier on the second Monday in October.
Me and Maxi were lucky enough to be invited back to Lockwood Farm to celebrate it over the weekend with James and Cammy, their whole extended family, and the two WWOOFers Ryoko and Haruka. What better place to spend a harvest festival than on a farm?
Saturday was a lazy, restful day in which nobody did much, but the evening was great fun. James and Cammy went out, so Maxi, Ryoko, Haruka and I had the house to ourselves. We had pizza for dinner, made from scratch. After I found a yeast-free dough recipe online, Maxi made the base, I chopped vegetables for the topping, Ryoko made cookies and a salad, and Haruka laid the table and took photos =] No yeast meant we didn't have to leave the dough to rise, so it was incredibly quick and simple to make: just flour, baking powder, salt, water and oil, mixed until a smooth ball can be formed and rolled out. While of course a little denser than most pizza bases, it wasn't very much so and tasted great. We topped it with tomato puree/paste, cheese, onions, rocket, peppers, courgette, tuna and peanuts. It tasted so good! We ate the salad while impatiently waiting for the second pizza to finish cooking. Before sitting down to watch Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, we finished off with some of Ryoko's cookies, and marshmallows toasted over candle flames :)
Late on Sunday morning the four of us left on a walk to Cobble Hill Mountain, taking Enzo with us - much to his delight. The hour-long walk through the forest to the top was lovely. Apart from our feet rustling the dry leaves strewn across the trails, and the odd breeze sending more floating down in whispering showers, it was still and quiet. The fronds of bracken gleamed silver and the maple trees were resplendent in colours that "red", "yellow" and "orange" are too boring for. There were sticks aplenty to throw for Enzo, though after bounding off after them he rather enjoyed breaking them and eating the ends... We reached the top - which was a somewhat strange area of exposed mossy bedrock and shortish trees that gave the place a feel of an abandoned orchard - and rested awhile in the warm sunshine looking out at the wonderful view to the south and west.
After lunch back at the farm, we spent an hour or two peeling and chopping quince, a fruit similar to apples and pears but one that is usually not edible when raw. They have a wonderfully sweet fragrance, and two full tubs had been sitting in the kitchen for days so the room was filled with it. It wasn't the most enjoyable task - they were covered in a grey-white fluff that stuck to the fingers, and were really hard and tough to cut - but it was worth it. The quince sauce made from them was incredible!
Fifteen people sat down to the big Thanksgiving meal on Sunday evening. Two dining tables had been pushed together next door, and even then it was a squeeze to fit everyone around them - and to fit all the food on. Roast turkey, roast potatoes, stuffing, carrots, parsnips, beetroots, courgette, sweet potato, potato salad, creamed corn, cranberry sauce, quince sauce, and gravy, followed by trifle and pumpkin pie.
Of course most of it was from the farm, which was wonderful. Cammy brined the 10kg turkey overnight before smothering it in lots of butter and herbs and roasting on a low heat for several hours. The potatoes were put into the same pan so tasted amazing. Maxi had fried slices of courgette in olive oil and garlic then put them in a dish with parsley, salt and lemon juice. Ryoko and Haruka made a Japanese potato salad, which uses mashed potatoes instead of chunks. James' sister had made what sounds to probably most non-Americans incredibly odd: sweet potato with marshmallow. Thick slices of the potato baked with butter, sugar, a bit of salt, possibly one or two other things but I can't remember, and marshmallow, results in a soft, sweet, syrupy dish that was so good! Needless to say, everything was delicious and nobody went away without feeling completely stuffed.
Some of us finished off the evening by playing a domino game called 'Mexican Train'. It was fun! I play board and card games so rarely that I don't know how to play any, and can never grasp the rules by just being told, it takes me a while. This was really simple, though, and despite my having never played with dominoes before, I understood it straight away and could just enjoy the game :)
On Monday morning I saw a hummingbird. I'd never seen a hummingbird! What a lovely thing to see first thing in the morning. Wonderful :)
We spent the morning cleaning eggs. It was Thanksgiving Day itself, a public holiday, so everyone took it easy and did no non-essential farm work. The table is usually in the workshop but, because it was gloriously sunny and warm, we moved it outside. Lunch was leftovers - the food on that table had fed fifteen people twice - and after that we did not a lot. I read for a couple of hours, sat on the sofa outside on the veranda while it was still fairly warm. James and Barry continued laying tiles for the soon-to-arrive wood stove, until the former went to chop wood and Maxi asked him to show her how to do it. So all four of us WWOOFers had a lesson in splitting logs with an axe, which was great fun! :D James' nephew and Cammy had a go, too, though of course neither of them are new at it.
We had a sushi party for dinner! Ryoko and Haruka made tuna and shrimp sushi rolls, a sushi salad (all the ingredients in a bowl instead of wrapped in nori, the edible seaweed that in Wales is called laver), and tamagoyaki, an egg roll or Japanese omelette. I've only tried sushi once before, from Pret's, vegetable not fish, and it was somewhat bland on its own but unpleasant with the soy sauce. So I was a little worried that I wouldn't like it again, but everything was really nice (though I didn't have it with soy sauce). For dessert, later, James made caramelised bananas with more than a splash of brandy (the flambeing wasn't successful) and served them on cold ice-cream. Yum! He and Cammy had spent a year in Japan soon after marrying, and did some acting work as extras, so they showed us a scene from "The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift" in which James appears. We then watched Top Gear :D
Maxi and I would be getting up before dawn to catch the 6:45am bus to Victoria, so we said goodbye to Cammy, Ryoko and Haruka before everyone went to bed. James drove us the two minutes to the bus stop in the still-dark morning, so we said goodbye to him there when the bus arrived. It took an hour and a half to get to Victoria, and I spent the entire time gazing out the window in tranquil wonder at the beauty of the quiet world we passed, ever so gradually brightening with the pastel blush of sunrise.
We took a second bus from Victoria to the Swartz Bay ferry terminal, where we waited two hours for the 11am sailing to Tsawwassen, which - despite receiving a ferry between once and twice every hour - only has one bus every hour. The bus queue was so long that only half of it managed to fit, packed to absolute full capacity, into the vehicle. Everyone else, including Maxi and I, had to wait an hour for the next one. Thankfully the 10am sailing had been cancelled so we didn't have people from that ferry in front of us as well. It's absurd. We did manage to squeeze onto the 2pm bus, though, and arriving in Vancouver nine hours after leaving the farm Maxi and I went our separate ways, she to a hostel then onto Banff, and me back to Kitsilano.
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