Turkey-flavored Jolly Ranchers

I'd like to tell you a story.

One summer, way before I was born, my mother was chaperoning a group of high school students on a guided tour of Europe. They were in France on July fourth, which of course the French don't celebrate as the Independence Day holiday. July fourth in France is just a day, like July third and July fifth. Anyway, the group was having its lunch, which was just a typical French lunch (I forget what exactly they were eating, but the point was that there was nothing special about it). At the end of lunch, though, before they all got up to continue on their tour, the group leader made an announcement. He said that no American should have to go without watermelon on the Fourth of July, and he brought out a bag of watermelon flavored Jolly Ranchers that he had brought from the States for that very purpose. Each of the members of the tour got a watermelon flavored Jolly Rancher just as a symbolic celebration of the Independence Day holiday which they were missing by being abroad.

I've been thinking about that story a lot over the past few days. This will be the first Thanksgiving that I've ever not spent at home. And as you might expect, Greece does not celebrate Thanksgiving Day. There are no Thanksgiving decorations in the stores; they've moved right to Christmas decorations. The grocery store isn't running specials on turkeys and cranberry sauce; Greeks don't even eat turkeys, and I don't know where I'd go if I wanted to track one down. My classes will not be canceled on Thursday. I will be expected to show up at 3:45 with my normal portion of Xenophon translated as usual.

This is when I feel being an expatriate most keenly. Most of the differences between Greece and the United States I can deal with just from knowing that I am in a different place. Bothell and Haverford are different places, and Athens is a place different from both of those. But it's like Greece functions on a completely different calendar than the States. Holidays are important. Missing them is missing mile markers on the wheel of the year. Not celebrating Halloween was strange enough, stranger for me probably than for most of my classmates, with the importance my family places on Halloween. But Thanksgiving is something different. Not everyone celebrates Halloween, or celebrates it in the same way. But most people in the United States mark Thanksgiving. It's a national holiday, an integral part of our collective consciousness. It's part of how things are. But that's not how things are in Greece. They may be on the Gregorian calendar just like us, but their calendar is far different all the same.

So instead of being at home, or at least at a friend's house in the United States, I will be here in Greece. Instead of watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, followed by the National Dog Show and Miracle on 34th Street, I will be listening to whatever music will make me feel the least homesick. Instead of bustling around the house trying to get it cleaned enough to have company over and helping my mother in the kitchen, I will be trying to get my Greek prepared well enough not to make a fool of myself in class. And instead of being together with my parents, my sister, my grandparents, my uncle, and whatever stray birds my mother has adopted this Thanksgiving, my roommates and I will be having a potluck, all of us expatriates together, trying to make this alien country feel a little bit more like home.

And all the while I will be thinking of Jolly Ranchers, and the cost of being abroad in a season when all my heart yearns for home.