Happy Thanksgiving

We managed to celebrate Thanksgiving here with a fairly complete Thanksgiving meal. We pre-ordered a turkey that turned out to be maybe six or seven pounds - the size of a chicken, really. We ordered cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie ingredients - none of which arrived in time. In response, we had to go potluck style, which resulted in contributions of some less-traditional (for us) Thanksgiving dishes, like matzo-ball soup, but also great mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce.

The best addition to the evening was when The Lovely Katherine's boss announced that he had been gifted a fresh turkey by the Minister of Tribal and Border Affairs. Said boss, a former CNN correspondent of some renown, showed up at our door Wednesday evening to drop off the box above. It turns out it had taken some convincing to persuade the Minister that we really didn't want live turkeys - we had nowhere to put them and nowhere to slaughter them. So we got this very freshly killed and dressed turkey, which was just a bit scrawny but still certainly bigger than the tiny turkey we had shipped in.

The staff photographer has some pictures of the turkey out of the bag, with it's big creepy neck flopping all over, just beside the knife and scissors your correspondent had been using to hack out all the giblets from the inside. The picture is actually stunningly unattractive, and we've declined to publish it in case any of our loyal readers is reading this just before lunch. In any case, I don't know what professional turkey-cleaners' or hunters' secret is, but I can say with certainty that there must be a better way to remove turkey giblets than the one your correspondent resorted to.

In the end, we got it cooked, and it was, somewhat surprisingly, not more delicious than our American factory-famred Turkeys. But it was fine, and we had plenty of good food and good company, and most precious of all, a holiday that we didn't actually have to work through at the Embassy.