A Scarfie Thanksgiving.

After lunch today, Stina and I went downtown to pick up the key to the Botanic Garden Centre (where I'll be holding the workshop) and raid the grocery store for pumpkin-pie ingredients. Conversations with our other flatmates had revealed long before that the pumpkin pie is a peculiarly North American phenomenon: no one else in the house had ever tried it, and indeed they all found the idea of a sweet pumpkin dish a bit weird. It's a vegetable here, like a squash or kumara (sweet potato). We'd already resolved to make pies on Halloween; today we had good reason to jump the gun, which I'll explain in a bit.

During the afternoon, we baked. As there's no such thing as canned pumpkin puree in New Zealand, and as a third of the flat is gluten-free, we baked from scratch. A simple pastry recipe published in the Critic (the student magazine) a month ago proved substitutable with gluten-free ingredients; online recipes proved helpful at reducing three kilos of pumpkin to puree. We ended up with three small pies (~8"), one big one (~10"), a huge casserole dish full of crustless-baked pie filling, another dish of unsweetened pumpkin puree, and a living room full of alternately delicious and burnt smells.

After dinner and my choir practice, we headed off to the aforementioned gun-jumping stimulus. One of Stina's friends, Tim, has a potluck every Thursday night, to which he occasionally attaches a theme. This week, the theme was Thanksgiving. The two of us, Fred, and two of Stina's other friends (have I mentioned Katie before?) hiked out Malvern Street to Tim's place. Outside, the house was as humble as any student flat; inside, it was humble but clean and clearly loved, furnished with benches and eclectica, well-lit, and full of people. The hosts were gracious and friendly, the food varied and tasty (though amusingly heavy on the desserts), and the conversation lively. Turkey is very expensive down here, but someone had roasted an entire chicken instead. Alcohol flowed, but no one seemed to get obnoxiously drunk, and the music stayed at conversation-permitting levels.

Dinner was served on a long "table" made by propping two wood-frame doors up end-to-end on six bricks. Everyone knelt or sat around it, eating from whatever plates, bowls, and takeout Tupperware came to hand. (The hosts' flat obviously had enough for them to use comfortably, but 20-some people stretched the supplies!) Once food was served, we went round proposing toasts to things to be thankful for: "Friendship. "Good health." "Waves." "Narwhals." "Pelvic thrusts at everything," which provoked raucous laughter. "Clouds." "Family." Mine: "The way happy things sneak up on you." (That earned some smiles and nods.)

About 10:15 (and how the time flew!), Fred and I said our goodbyes and walked together back to the flat. The rain-washed night felt especially bleak by contrast with the good cheer of Tim's Thanksgiving.