LIFE AS IT IS

In the West, “it’s the most wonderful time of the year,” because the holiday season is knocking on the door. Here in the continental U.S., where I live, from Thanksgiving until the New Year, the entire country dons a festive look. People shop, travel, donate, watch holiday movies, bake chocolate chip cookies, drink hot cocoa with marshmallows, get together with families and in the colder states, play in the snow.  The Daily Star link There are so many reasons for me to love this season!  Holiday decorations and lightings As the holiday season nears, families get into the holiday spirit, adding glitz to homes, making them merry, bright and beautiful inside and out. Like many others, we drive around cities and neighbourhoods just to marvel at Christmas decorations that make everything so bright and beautiful.  The holiday fever also touches our family  — we bring out our holiday table runner, snowman-themed mugs, bowls, dishes and pillow cases, and light...

Thanksgiving in the past three years came and went by and I did not feel the festivity around it. To me, Thanksgiving was synonymous to Black Friday shopping. But last Thanksgiving was different for me, and it was because of a group of people, who shouldered all the trouble of cooking a traditional turkey meal for themselves and their friends. There were baked turkey, mashed potato, sweet potato, corn, green peas, gravy, vegetable casserole, garlic bread and pumpkin pie on the menu. I ate to my heart’s and stomach’s content, it was my first traditional Thanksgiving meal after all. As I devoured the scrumptious food, I wondered if the first Thanksgiving celebrated by the natives and the Pilgrims, the first colonists to build permanent settlement in New England, had a similar menu. It turned out that the food served on the first Thanksgiving did not really have anything common with the kind of food cooked today.  There are mixed opinions though. While some believe that the feast h...