Happy Thanksgiving!

I’d like to wish a happy Thanksgiving to all my of American readers! I hope you have family or friends to celebrate with, and still find plenty of things to be thankful for in these rather difficult times.

Europeans might find it hard to understand what all the fuss is about. When I first arrived in America, I didn’t appreciate how momentous this holiday is. So let’s just cover a few basics: Thanksgiving is bigger than Christmas. Everybody tries to celebrate this holiday with their family – and because America is such a big country, that means a lot of travel. In Germany, I was used to the idea that you can get pretty much anywhere by car in a matter of 8 hours. In the US, it takes 5 hours by plane to go between the east and west coast. On Thanksgiving the roads are packed, and the airports are busy.

But really, the best way to understand the magnitude of Thanksgiving is to be single, without a family in the US, and trying to do anything on Thanksgiving evening. Like me when I first got to America. Thanksgiving might be the only day of the year that America shuts down. No stores are open, no restaurants (or even fast food chains) serve food to the unprepared newcomer. Xmas is a walk in the park compared to Thanksgiving.

Every American grows up with a host of Thanksgiving memories: football games, family gatherings…family dramas. Coming to America, I didn’t have any of these memories, so I slowly started building them. In the first couple of years I didn’t do anything, but after that, I started hooking up with friends and coworkers who were in the same situation as me. Lots of up and coming game developers are young, single, and not always able to go back home for the holiday. When I was at Legend we banded together for a couple of years. The first year, we didn’t prepare any food and tried to find an open restaurant. It was around 8pm, and we drove around for an hour. Our group of four finally found an empty Mexican restaurant whose kitchen had already closed, but who would serve us some chips and salsa.
We were much better prepared for the following year. Everybody met at the Legend office, and Peter prepared a traditional turkey in the company kitchen while everybody else hung out, played games and watched Star Trek: TNG DVDs on the (for those days) huge TV. A couple of Epic programmers were in town to help with Unreal 2, and they joined us as well. It was a good evening, with one major problem: Peter’s turkey was 25lbs. It took forever to cook and wasn’t ready until 11:45pm. We started eating on Thanksgiving; but we finished on the following day

These days, I’m blessed with Victoria’s family. This is my fourth Thanksgiving in Grass Valley, and it’s a welcome break that allows us to take a step back from the worries of daily life. I brought the Wii for some extensive family bowling (as well as Fallout 3 for some “serious” gaming), and I’ll probably play too much ping pong with Victoria’s dad. Good times.

One of these years, we might start hosting Thanksgiving ourselves. Maybe next year – if we find a house that we can afford in the near future

P.S.: In true American spirit, the country will race to make up for its commercial inactivity tomorrow. After a day when nothing is open, every single store in the country will open early (often at 6am or earlier) to hawk its heavily discounted wares. Black Friday is the start of Christmas shopping, and when stores historically switch the ink in their accounting books from red to black. At least that’s how the myth goes. With the economy being the way it is, it feels much less appropriate to be spending a lot of money tomorrow. But Black Friday is an event as much as a shopping spree. You just have to go out and check out at least one of the stores – there’s just that energy. Victoria and I usually stop at Fry’s Electronics on our way back to the Bay Area. We’ll see if we find anything cheap yet interesting