Happy Thanksgiving!

I wanted to take a moment and give a shout out to some people who mean so much to us and who have really been there for us this past year. I’ll start with our kids, four terrific human beings who have continually given us so much joy. I’ll extend it to their spouses and significant others who are also superb. Another shout out to Sue and Jeff, the best neighbors anyone could have asked for! Miss you guys! Special thanks also to Elsa and Nelson for going above and beyond and being the most awesome of friends. Shout out also to my cousins, especially Paty and her family. And to my Aunt Pat whose fun emails I look forward to. And there are so many more people who have just been wonderful to us. You know who you are, and so do we, and we are eternally grateful!

I’m writing this a bit early because we will be spending Thanksgiving week with all our kids in Miami. It will be our first trip back to the US since we moved here, and we’re really looking forward to it.

Since Thanksgiving is such a huge holiday in the US, and it’s also celebrated, albeit on a different date, in Canada, sometimes it’s difficult for us Americans to imagine living somewhere where this holiday is just another non-remarkable day. But that’s how it is here in Spain. People have heard of the holiday—Dia de Acción de Gracias (literally, Day of Action of Thanks)–and they’ll wish you a happy one if they know you’re American, but otherwise, it’s business as usual. No parades, no turkey, no pumpkin pie, nothing.

Even though I understood this intellectually, when I lived here twenty years ago it always jarred me that Thanksgiving Day was a normal work/school day. At the American School where I taught, we’d have turkey sandwiches—getting roast turkey meat was just not logistically possible—and one of the teachers would make a pumpkin pie that we would share in the staff room. The younger children would color in pictures of pilgrims and cornucopias, and that was about it.

What has changed in the last twenty years in Spain? Still no Thanksgiving, but now the day after Thanksgiving, Black Friday, is a thing here. And it’s called Black Friday—it’s not translated from English.  As in, “No te pierdas las ofertas de Black Friday!” (Don’t miss the Black Friday deals!) And the sales go on for the whole weekend.

It’s such a big deal, that the Ayuntamiento de Madrid, the Madrid City Hall, has arranged for busses to run for free the entire weekend to encourage a more sustainable lifestyle (i.e. discourage people from driving their cars into the city). Here is their tweet:

Being so close to the city, it’s pretty easy for us to hop on a bus or train and scoot down there, so I thought I’d share some recent pictures from when we had to nip down for our pre-travel Covid tests. This first one is a crosswalk sign, which we found amusing:

The picture below is of Plaza Castilla, a place we go to pretty much every time we go into Madrid, but which we had never seen at street level. This is because there is a huge underground terminal where our busses from Tres Cantos arrive and from which we catch the metro trains. This week we came above ground when we got off the bus, and then walked the rest of the way to where we were going. It was surprising to see the large, funny-looking gold needle. This structure was a gift from the bank called Caja Madrid to the city of Madrid, in honor of its 300 year anniversary as a city. It is called the Obelisco de la Caja, and was designed by the Spanish architect, engineer and sculptor, Santiago Calatrava. It was erected in 2008, but they had a lot of problems because it is made up of multiple pieces and it was difficult to get it to stand right when they couldn’t dig deep since the underground trains are right there. But they finally figured it out.

This is our favorite beer—it’s a “Tostada 0,0” which is to say, a dark brew but with no alcohol. It’s great for having with lunch since you can get right back to work afterwards with no drowsiness. And it tastes really good—you’d never guess it was alcohol-free!

This is the façade of the building in front of where we got our Covid tests. I couldn’t figure out what the design was supposed to represent, though I do see a hummingbird beak in there.

Some flowers in a sidewalk stand.

And us, in front of a fountain, on our way to find a good restaurant for lunch.

Wishing you all a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday!

And as always, please check out (and tell someone about) my novels here.