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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Like a PP, we're expats and don't go home for the holidays because the 18 hour flight is just too much.

But, we're worse than the other expat PP because we didn't even go to the "Friendgiving" dinner some other expats had.

Here's why:

The Friendsgiving dinner was meant to happen at 8 pm on Thursday, a relevant detail when you consider that American Thanksgiving isn't a national holiday here, so we all had to go to work on Thursday and Friday.  With that in mind:

The host of the "Friendgiving" created a shared doc in which everyone was supposed to indicate exactly what they were cooking and bringing (host was making a turkey).  People got super competitive in preparing elaborate dishes.  The worst offenders here were the non-American expats from the UK or Australia or France: these people don't really know what American Thanksgiving looks like, so they were determined to go over the top in some kind of crazed culinary one-upsmanship.  One of them put creme brulee on the doc, indicating that they would bring their own blowtorch, and another put mushroom-stuffed flank steak rolls with three-berry salsa.

At my house, the kitchen is being remodelled and I didn't have a proper place to cook anything.  Plus, I get home at 6 pm.  I told the host this.  I volunteered to bring a giant green salad and prepare various dishes of cut fresh local tropical fruits.  The host came to see me at work on Wednesday, furrowed her brow and said it would be nice if I could also make a cheese board, and could I just go to the luxury imports-foods grocery to get something to "whip together"?  (We are in an Asian country where the locals don't really eat cheese, so the cheese available at the grocery. nearest to me is just a sad bag of shredded mozzerella.  This means that, to create the cheese board the host wanted, I would need to pay about four times the price for fine cheeses at the one imports-foods grocery that has a real cheese selection).  Keep in mind that the last time I attended a dinner at this host's house, a barbecue, I had prepared exactly what she suggested, painstakingly scrounging for expensive imported ingredients, and....nobody ate any of it.  Nobody at any of the majority of what any other person brought, either, because there was just too much damn food, it's hot (since there is only one season here, which is high summer, and everyone wanted to just go in the host's condo's pool, which is what happens at every get-together anybody has).

Sure, I could go buy the expensive cheeses, but I am annoyed the green salad and multiple sliced fresh fruits presentations weren't enough.  I would love to have those things as a diner myself: the tropical fruits here are abundant and amazing, and the perfect counterpart to the starchy, heavy Thanksgiving fare.  But no.  Host decreed this is not enough.

So I just said we can't come.

Am I petty and grinch-y?  Sure.  We probably won't go to the expat Christmas dinner either, for the same reasons.

But Thanksgiving was a peaceful, relaxed day on our house.  Actually, we had no traditional Thanksgiving foods at all.  And we didn't mention Thanksgiving.

The end, until Expat New Years (might go to that, as the behavior of expat Brit colleagues is just so entertaining, and the video footage that emerges from the event just doesn't do the actual performance justice).  [/quote]

No one has time to read this. Get an editor. [/quote]

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