Japan doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving like we do. Though they do always have November 23rd off. This year I got to celebrate my first Thanksgiving in Hokkaido. All the years previous to this, I’ve been here, but haven’t celebrated.
Our beautiful host, A. A lives in Sapporo and loves hosting parties with friends, so she decided to use Thanksgiving as an opportunity to get a bunch of us together – from school, church and other things.
The dinner spread. The red plates were to keep things warm – unfortunately I forgot to get a shot afterwards. We had: red and green peppers spread with cream cheese and topped with walnuts, salad with avocado and tomatoes, green beans, green beans wrapped in ham, an absolutely delicious butternut squash combination, German potatoes, beer bread and cranberries. (And something else under the back red plate, but I’m blanking on what it was).
A and the boys.
One of A’s friends, S, beautifully backlit. Though I wish I had been able to reflect some of that sun back to her face to light it up.
My table! We had a lot of fun chatting about all kinds of things. We were surprised to find that E had been to Virginia, the same state our host is from.
The other table full of beautiful people. We had people from all over at this celebration – USA, England, Australia, Japan, New Zealand. It was loads of fun.
At one point we started talking about all the crazy different words that are used between all of our English speaking countries. D told us that in New Zealand they say ‘rellies’ (I may be spelling that wrong) to mean ‘relatives.’ We were all very surprised and A and I decided we wanted to start using that word.
We also had a great discussion about the map and how it differs in our various countries. The US and English people use the same map, but apparently Australia’s map is upside down and Japan’s map places Japan near the center. During this conversation A exclaimed if it’s not set up like the US version ‘you can’t see that it all looks like one big puzzle!’ Then she found her US map puzzle.
For dessert, we had apple pie and roll cake (Yum!)
Pictures of a few more guests. I tried to grab some individual shots of everyone, but as I’m posting this, I realized I missed a lot of people. But the warm light after dinner gave those I caught a nice warm glow.
It was a fun first Thanksgiving celebration.
