Nuggets of Knowledge for your Knapsack of Facts

As the holidays approach we miss y'all more than ever. While we're none too pleased that we won't get to see you, we're thankful for the opportunity to be here in Berlin right now and for the year in Germany in general. And since y'all are gearing up for Thanksgiving back home we thought we'd toss some trivia your direction.

"When a celebration was deemed in order, the Puritans were delighted to let their hair down. The first Thanksgiving feast went on for three full days and involved, in addition to copious eating and drinking, such diversions as stoneball, a game similar to croquet, and competitions of running, jumping, arm-wrestling, shooting and throwing."

While I doubt we'll participate in any throwing or jumping, we do plan on celebrating Thanksgiving with the other Berlin Boschies on Saturday. No one has Thursday off which we figured would grossly inhibit food preparation and as the meal is central to Thanksgiving, a deferment was in order. We've got one person on turkey-duty and the rest of us are contributing favorite holiday sides (or at least some version of them as ingredients like Cream of Mushroom soup can be difficult to find).

Speaking of turkeys:

"The colonists were... well acquainted with a New World food that abounded along the eastern seaboard: the turkey. A not unreasonable question is how a native American bird came to be named for a country four thousand miles away. The answer is that when turkeys first appeared in England, some 80 years before the Mayflower set sail, they were mistakenly supposed to have come from Turkey. They had in fact come from Spain, brought there from Mexico by Hernan Cortes's expedition of 1519. Many other European nations made a similar geographical error in naming the bird. The French thought they came from India and thus called them chickens 'd'Inde,' from which comes the modern French dindon. The Germans, Dutch and Swedes were even more specifically inaccurate in their presumptions, tracing the bird to the Indian city of Calicut, and thus gave it their respective names Kalekuttisch Hün, kalkoen, and kalkon. By the 1620s, the turkey was so well known in Europe, and its provenance had so long been assumed to be the Near East, that the Pilgrims were astounded to find them in abundance in their new-found land."

Happy Thanksgiving to you all!!!

Love,

John and Lauren

A big thanks to Bill Bryson's book Made in America for the included trivia tid-bits.