Thanksgiving, Yupik style

For some reason, Thanksgiving is a holiday that never really spoke to me.  Which is odd when I think about it, because I love food, cooking, football.  When I was a kid, my dad always took us younger kids to Green Lake to feed the ducks and get ice cream from Baskin and Robbins (and get us out of the house so that Mom could have an hour of peace).  I guess it was the forced BE HAPPY and THANKFUL Hallmark marketing that got me down, and once I learned the true story of the so-called Pilgrims and how much they sucked, most of the allure was gone.  Thanks a lot, Howard Zinn.

But this year, I spent Thanksgiving with real live indigenous people, and for the first time in too many years to count, I have more blessings than challenges.  At school, there was a potluck open to anyone on staff who wanted to attend, and about half showed up.  Of those, half were Yupik.  They brought things like dried salmon strips and frozen berry concoctions but also things from a traditional New England dinner like ham and pumpkin pie.  The guy from Minnesota made wild rice, the lady from Texas made green been casserole, the other lady from Texas made an upside down pineapple cake.  There was no moose or whale or seal, though I guess in the past there has been.

When deciding what to make, I looked at my stock of canned food to see what wouldn't make too big a dent in my stores and decided to make something easy.  And wound up making a pretty good corn and potato chowder which easily weighed twenty pounds in the crockpot as I staggered down the hall with it.  I had packed everything over to the school in a backpack so I could use the school's internet to Skype with friends while it cooked.

Deciding where to sit was a major dilemma for me.  Do I go for the new and sit with people I sort of knew but not really?  Or with those more familiar?  In the end, I kinda split the vote by sitting with the people who live in my building but I don't know all that well.  I was saved from having to be too social by a student of mine who was there with his "Amma" (a kind of grandmother relative but not an actual grandmother--relationships are hard to unravel here).  Roy is very sweet but does need to work on his social graces like any 11 year old.  He talked non-stop, ate anything with sugar in it, tried and spit out the wild rice, and tried to get the lyrics to the "Batman smells" version of Jingle Bells for so long, I finally told him to flat out give it a rest.  He grinned,  wandered off to get yet another soda and spent the rest of the time running around aimlessly with the other 6th grade boy.  When he first sat down, he had one plate that was filled only with desserts.  The rest of us laughed until he came back, loaded down with another plate of actual food.  Which he devoured, minus the rice, because he is, well, an 11 year old boy.

Although advertised as a two hour thing, after an hour, the Vice Principal very obviously started not only wrapping up the leftovers of the turkey he brought, but stacking chairs as well as tables.  So, we finished up, cleaned up and set up the Commons for the basketball tournament that was to start later that day and run all weekend.  Basketball bores me to tears, so I plan to spend the rest of the break cleaning my house, binge watching that new show on Amazon and sleeping up to 18 hours a day.  And for that, I am thankful.