Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Finding a turkey for Thanksgiving in Belgium

Since our very arrival here in Belgium, we and our fellow American families have been presented with the same Thanksgiving dilemma every year: how to acquire a turkey. Belgians don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, and they only eat turkey for Christmas, hence turkeys will only be available here in the stores closer to Christmas. In fact, somebody in the business explained to us, the turkeys will not be of acceptable size this time of the year, should we be able to locate one, because they’re all bread to be slaughtered for Christmas and not earlier. One year we were able to order a turkey in the grocery store (indeed it was tiny) and picked it up the day before Thanksgiving. The next year we ordered a turkey from the very same grocery store however when we came to pick it up it had not been delivered. Another year we ordered a turkey from a special fowl shop and it cost a fortune!

Last Saturday I went to the grocery store and was startled when I reached the meat section. Lo and behold; they had turkeys, on special. A whole section filled to the brim with fresh turkeys. What possibly had possessed our Belgian grocery store to suddenly start selling turkeys at the end of November?! Nobody knows, however our yearly dilemma was solved. We don’t need to order a turkey, but can simply get one at the grocery store, like normal people, a couple of days before Thanksgiving. Or can we? It’s not possible that they’d sell turkeys only one random week in November, run out, and then not have them again until Christmas, is it? Well, our unison answer was, this IS, after all, Belgium.

Tomorrow I shall, a bit nervously, return to the grocery store and hopefully, with a bit of luck, I’ll be able to buy a turkey.

By Lovain

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I hate to brag but our turkey yesterday was 26 lbs. (That's nearly 12 kilos). My sister-in-law's cousins were visiting from France. You should have seen their eyes bugging out when we took it out of the oven!

Have a great Thanksgiving!

-A