Letters to the Editor

Traditions are comforting, but sometimes you just have to improvise and make the best of things when spending holidays far from home.

While serving as civilians at a military base in Bavaria in 1996, my eventual wife and I spent a long November weekend in Budapest with two other American couples. We hadn’t met them before, but mutual friends suggested we all had much in common.

We boarded a train late Thanksgiving morning and began to get acquainted over a pre-packed spread of cold turkey, cranberry sauce, candied yams and pumpkin muffins just east of Linz.

The other passengers on the train were amused, but understood and wished us a happy holiday.

Aside from some absurdities – a group ticket large enough to cover a Datsun, sharing a train car with the Belgium Disco Dance Performance Team, watching one of those dancers take three hours to eat a Snickers bar – the trip details are hazy, but we became lifelong friends who continue to share the joys and sorrows of our lives three decades later.

I spent another memorable Thanksgiving at the Monterey Brewing Company in California in 1991, joining the barmaid and a handful of other single, unattached regulars for a private lunch in the closed brewery.

We all brought something to share, but a power outage struck just as we sat down to eat. With no music to distract us or limit engagement to small talk, we ate by candlelight and filled the silence with deep conversation, listening and connecting and bonding with one another. It was like a very special episode of Cheers.

The lights and radio came back on as we started dessert. They were turned off in short order to sustain the magic.

Traditional experiences? Hardly. But hard to top in embodying the spirit of Thanksgiving.