Thanksgiving Outside the U.S., Part III

Mandy Dowd, a poet and artist living in the south of France, once had the challenging task of explaining pumpkin pie to a guest who was highly skeptical of what he called une tarte Americaine. She did not help her cause by pronouncing molasses as malaise, the French word for, well, malaise. He declared the pie "special" and left it half uneaten.

In Bangladesh, Debbie Ingram, a development worker, and her partner managed to get a turkey from the U.s. embassy's commissary. When it was cooked, they paraded their proud dinner around on a platter. "Our guests could hardly believe there was a bird on earth that big," says Ingram, "as animals and vegetables in Bangladesh tend to be quite small."

James Ledbetter for Chow magazine, Holiday 2004 issue