Dia de Accion de Gracias

Understandably, the teachers at my school love weeks with American Holidays. The weeks of Halloween, the Super Bowl, Valentine's Day, and of course this past Thanksgiving week, they hand every class over to me and sit and grade papers while I show YouTube Vidoes and gab on and on about American traditions. While this requires very little of me, it becomes unbelievably mind numbing to repeat the same 50 min. lesson on the Pilgrims 16 times in 4 days. Plus there's really only so many times you can talk about Thanksgiving and family without becoming homesick. Add on top of that the looming fear I had all week that I might not be able to find any traditional food in Spain, and I'm not going to lie, but I was beginning to dread my first Thanksgiving away from home.

But then two packages (one from my mom and one from my roommate's) arrived. Boxes of stuffing, pie mix, slim jims (sidenote to my mom: while I appreciate the gesture, Slim Jims are not vegetarian. Probably not really meat though either), mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and a tofurkey all managed to dodge customs. After procuring some fresh veggies I began to believe that Thanksgiving was a-go.

Spain, however, decided to fight me and my American friends tooth and nail and repeatedly challenged us for our beloved day. Evaporated milk for the pies was nowhere to be found in the grocery stores. Screw you Spain, I boiled down my own milk and added polenta for texture. And so what if there are no can openers here? A sharp pair of scissors will do nicely.

 So with very few pans, a small kitchen, and about 5 determined cooks, me and my friends ended up with a pretty decent spread.

But now, for your entertainment....

The top 5 Thanksgiving Misconceptions from my students that peppered my week with a little humor.

5) About 1/3 of my students believe we eat chicken on Thanksgiving. And only about 1 student per class truly understands what a pie is. Since there is no direct translation of the word into Spanish, when asked what a pumpkin pie was, the kids described everything from a pumpkin cake to a pumpkin empanada to something close to an orangish donut.

4) That Pocahontas is nothing more than a Disney character. I know this isn't directly related to Thanksgiving, but I mentioned the braided Indian princess as a reference for a group of 16 year olds in order to explain who the Native Americans were. They all laughed and said "pero ella no existe."

3) I gave my students a worksheet with multiple choice questions about Thanksgiving. One of the questions was "What was the name of the Pilgrims ship? a) Pinta b) Mayflower c) Black Pearl" One student was convinced the answer was c).

2) There is no "holiday season" here in Spain. There is Christmas. There is New Years. There is Three Kings Day. But they are not grouped into one idea like they are in the US. Therefore when shown a clip of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade with Santa in it, there was a lot of confusion about what holiday we were actually talking about. I think one student even thought Santa was trying to steal the holiday away from the Tom Turkey float.

Sidenote: I asked my students what they thought of the parade and all it's over-the-top pagentry. One boy said "Only in America." Probably the most astute comment of the week.

1) At the beginning of every class I asked the students what they already knew about Thanksgiving just so I could get a sense of where they were at with the topic. In one class a girl that speaks almost fluent English raised her hand and said that Thanksgiving was a dinner that celebrated the English settlers' arrival in America and the beginning of their attempts to kill all the Indians and steal their land. Not 100% accurate, but not really false either.

K Learns Spanish: Lesson 9

arándanos- cranberries

Pelegrinos- Pilgrims

cosecha- harvest

ciénaga- bog.


Sidenote: be aware that most Spaniards will assume a bog is a bush that produces cranberries.