Thanksgiving in La Unión

I feel like Thanksgiving snuck up on me this year because I wasn’t home to see all the decorations filling the aisles of stores, the commercials on tv for Black Friday, or watch the Charlie Brown special on CBS. It just hasn’t quite felt like the holiday season down here, but nonetheless we are finding ways to celebrate! It wasn’t a built-up or prolonged celebration but I got to celebrate Thanksgiving with my students and coworkers from school with lots of crafts and good food.

Crafts: If you know me at all, you know that I am obsessed with arts and crafts and will take any opportunity to do something crafty. If I could manage to convince the administration to let me have Art class every day, I would. So naturally this has been a very exciting time for me perusing Pinterest and Google for cute craft ideas that I can pull off with my students. These are what I came up with (everything is slightly, heavily, very ‘turkey’ oriented because I didn’t plan in advance or think to teach the Thanksgiving story).

The first little guys we made are what I call our “potato turkeys.” For art class we traced our feet and our hands various times on brown, green, gold, and red paper. We angled the feet and pasted them together to create the turkey’s body, and then taped the hands all over the back to create the feathers. They looked rather convincing as turkeys at this point! It’s when I told the students to draw faces that the turkeys began to lose form. My students have no concept of what a ‘Thanksgiving’ turkey looks like so they drew very generic faces. The end result: potato turkeys. You decide for yourself, but not very many of these scream ‘turkey’ to me – at least they are innocently cute!

On Tuesday of Thanksgiving week, every class I taught was centered on Thanksgiving and turkeys. In fact, I gave out so many turkey worksheets, one of my students was convinced that I had a serious obsession with turkeys; I overheard him say to another student in Spanish, “Wow, Miss must really like turkeys!” My students colored multiple coloring pages that featured turkeys, turkeys dressed like pilgrims, and more turkeys. In Reading we read the story, “Thanksgiving Helper,” as a class. They wrote their own “I Am Thankful” books to tell and illustrate everything they are thankful for. In Math, they completed addition and subtraction facts that were positioned inside turkey bodies, and they did a color-by-number turkey multiplication worksheet. They cut out turkeys and feathers, wrote what they are thankful for on the feathers, colored everything, and glued together the parts to create ‘thankful’ turkeys. And what is Thanksgiving without the infamous hand-turkey? We traced our hands and wrote the one thing that we are most thankful for underneath it. I took a series of pictures of my students because a) they’re really cute, b) they’re extra cute with their turkeys, and c) it warms my heart to see their cute smiles and the things they are thankful for.

  

   

Food: Also on that Tuesday we celebrated Thanksgiving by eating together as a class. The office actually sent home a note the day before telling parents that we would be eating ‘Thanksgiving’ together so they should a ‘traditional’ lunch with their student of chicken, potatoes, vegetables, and fruit. On top of this I decided to share a little of my idea of Thanksgiving with my little ones. As much as I would have liked to make pumpkin or apple pie, cranberry sauce, or sweet potatoes, keep in mind that I live in rural Honduras and almost none of those ingredients are available. Instead, I compromised and got creative! I baked a loaf of bread since I love the crescent rolls at Thanksgiving dinner; and I made apple sauce to get as close to apple pie as possible (Lori and I peeled, cored, chopped, boiled, and smashed 34 apples to make our applesauce, and it was all entirely worth it!). About half my students liked the applesauce and they almost all liked the bread.

We topped off the festive day with a Thanksgiving dinner for all the teachers. A few of the Honduran teachers did their research and spent all day cooking up a traditional Thanksgiving meal for everyone! We had a turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, garlic bread, green bean casserole, stuffing, pumpkin pie, cheesecake, and chocolate cake. Talk about a feast! And it was all absolutely delicious! I would have never bet that we could have had that great of a meal in La Unión. We showed the Honduran teachers how you are supposed to completely stuff yourself with all the tasty food – we would not let them get away with eating just one plate of food. It was also the first Thanksgiving meal our two British volunteers had ever eaten. Imagine that mixture of cultures: coming from England, celebrating an American holiday (for the first time) in Honduras. In was an excellent meal and all of our bellies were quite content.

My prayer request this week is a praise and is what I am thankful for here: my La Unión family. We have all grown extremely close these last few months and have built our own little family. I cannot imagine this experience without them by my side or with a better group of people. We support and love each other, play, eat, work, and hang out together. I am so thankful for my new friends and family in all the foreign and Honduran teachers that make this place feel like home!