Zanksgeeving

American holidays, especially ones of the family-recipe-fueled-gastronomical-goodness varieties, are always tough when you’re yanked out of the traditional comfort zone and dropped in a foreign country. This year, in an effort to preemptively ease the holiday homesickness, the group of us ex-pats was invited to a tiny restaurant in the first arrondissement, Oh Mon Cake, for a “Thanksgiving cocktail.” (And yes, we all realized the words “Thanksgiving” and “cocktail” presented a bit of an oxymoronic situation.)

Whether or not we were aware of it, many of us woke up yesterday morning dreaming of stuffing and slow-cooked turkeys with gravy and homemade cranberry sauce simmering on the stovetop. Instead of sleeping in, shimmying into a pair of yoga pants and a sweatshirt and rolling up to Grandma’s house in undeniable I’m-ready-to-gain-15-pounds style, I took the Metro to work with the rest of the blurry-eyed commuters, and spent my morning explaining this picture to my coworkers:

"But...why?" was the most frequently asked question. "That, I know nothing," my sage French self replied solemnly.

“Zanksgeeving,” is a subject of simultaneous fascination and confusion for the French, as I soon discovered, which is perhaps why we ended up at a place serving Thanksgiving-type fare in the form of cakey breads and shot glasses of soup. Not quite American, not quite French.

Though I’m sure we were for the most part expecting the worst, the homage to our turkey slaughtering ancestors from across the pond was surprisingly edible and not as comical as expected. What was comical was cramming about 35 of us in a small upstairs room and watching everyone try to determine if this was a French cocktail party, where guzzling your drink first thing and hunting around for a napkin to fill up with a stash of peanuts or chips or something is a faux-pas, or an American one, where toting around a bottle of champagne for yourself is acceptable after a few rounds.

The confusion lasted for a respectable five minutes, and then disintegrated into a free for all. Five minutes after that, the conversations had ratcheted back to a standard American 8.9 on the Richter scale. Slices of the turkey cake-bread, corn bread with lardons, fromage blanc with cucumbers and tomatoes and small shooters of chocolate mousse were snatched off platters (Snatched! Who knew?), the whole thing passed quickly and the holiday was over before I knew it.

Even though there’s a small hole in my heart today where a leftover turkey sandwich usually goes, here’s to the French Thanksgiving. And to Apple and Cider, the pardoned turkeys, Paris is just bursting with semi-confused happiness for you.

Bring on the hot wine, roasted chestnuts and Mariah Carey singles—Paris doesn't mess around for Christmas.