Thanksgiving Day in Sweden 2009

Time has flown by so fast as we approach the Christmas holidays to celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus.  Well I'm sure all of you just recently celebrated Thanksgiving with your family and friends, and I'm sure some of you got out really early for Black Friday in the mad rush of people looking for discounts on Christmas presents (I wish they had some sells like that here in Sweden, the taxes are too high here for that though!).  Well as you know Thanksgiving is an American holiday (it's Canadian as well but they celebrate theirs in October), so here in Sweden there are very few cooking turkey's and having a big celebration on that day, mostly just Americans living here.  Well this year I decided to have a Thanksgiving dinner in my apartment so that the international students we are connected with could experience this American holiday.  I was expecting maybe 10-15 students to show up, but they kept coming in the door and we had 25 people here!  I didn't even have enough seats for everybody, but it was a great night overall and I'm sure almost half the people were new.  Normally Thursday nights we have our home group Bible study at my place, so this was a good chance to connect with some new exchange students and invite them to our worship services as well and just befriend them.  

This was the first time I tried cooking a turkey by myself and surprisingly it turned out great!  I also made some homemade macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes, and banana pudding.  One American girl also made some green bean casserole and fudge.  A few international students brought food as well so we had just enough.  It was a great time overall, but man was I tired, I cooked for about 6 hrs that day and it's harder work that it looks like!  Up at the top you can see  2 pictures.  One is turkey right as it came out of the oven, and the next is the after picture.  People tore it up!  All in all it was an enjoyable Thanksgiving dinner, about as good as it can get when you're away from home.  You can view the rest of my pictures and videos from my Thanksgiving dinner here in Sweden by clicking here http://www.flickr.com/photos/17394877@N05/  Hope you all had a great one!  I will be coming home in some weeks for Christmas break so hopefully I will see a lot of you then.  

God bless,

Adam Moody