Today is Thanksgiving Day in the U.S., a day when non-vegetarians typically sit down to a roast turkey dinner.

I have it on good authority — from an American woman who has lived here for 20 years — that one can easily find the ingredients here for a traditional turkey dinner with all the trimmings (stuffing, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, green bean casserole, etc), except for the pumpkin pie. There is no such thing as canned pumpkin pie filling here in Germany. Well, seeing as how they don’t typically make pumpkin pies here, I guess there’s not much market for the canned stuff.  They do sell whole pumpkins here, of course. But the filling for a pumpkin pie properly comes from a can, and not from scratch, as everybody (in the U.S.) knows. 😉

Anyway, since many people have asked me this year, I thought I’d put a mention here on the blog that

• yes, they have turkeys available for purchase in Germany
• no, it’s not that common to find roast turkey on the menu
• yes, it’s much more expensive to buy a turkey here than in the U.S. (well, at least last year a friend bought one big enough to feed 20 people and paid around 90 euros (roughly equivalent to USD $120), but maybe that was comparable to some sort of fresh, free-range turkey in the US which would also be somewhat pricey
• no, Chris and I will not be eating turkey today

I could have purchased a turkey at the butcher shop today, but chose instead to buy pork. That is much more common here, and also much cheaper here, and, besides, Chris and I don’t even like turkey very much.  We did consider going out to eat today at our favorite  restaurant to partake of their seasonal offerings of duck or goose, but we ultimately decided to wait to do that over the weekend. After all, today was just another work day here, of course.

BTW, not only is today not the Thanksgiving Day holiday in Germany, there is in fact, no national Thanksgiving day holiday in Germany at all. Now you know.

Anyway, I don’t have any photos of turkeys in Germany, but I do have a photo of a guy feeding the swans in Hamburg. Since it envelopes the themes of eating and birds, I’ll consider this close-enough to a proper Thanksgiving themed photo. 😉

And to all our friends and family in the U.S., Happy Thanksgiving!

Feeding the birds, Hamburg