Moangiving

At this time each year, the American ex-colony celebrates its continued survival by indulging in the mass slaughter of turkeys and the laying down of beers in the fridge. The first time I visited the Land of the Expensive, it was Thanksgiving, and I was taken by our generous hosts along with their entire family up to the very beautiful Bass Lake, California to celebrate.

I was amazed at the amount of food we managed to consume. At the time, my girlfriend and I were vegetarian, so we ate some oddities which had been diligently and conscientiously prepared for us by Anne, the hostess. These comprised pseudo-Turkey rashers, which took about 30 minutes to erupt into massive flatulence, and the alternative (served day 2) was a nut roast, but one so swimming with egg that it was more like a baked omelette with nut garnish. I don't think they understood that nuts are a really good source of nutrition on their own and that the egg in there is just supposed to bind the mixture together. Despite not joining in the meat-fest, we were treated with huge civility, and we made up for our lack of decent mains by eating all their roast vegetables, which were delicious, while they systematically demolished the Turkey until they were sick of it and dying for a burger.

I named Mr Turkey Reginald Clarkesonville, to the raised eyebrows of the family and the amusement of Deanna, the youngest daughter who had spent some time in the UK and had a sense of ironic humour.

The family were thrust together much as at Christmas, in enforced bonhomie, gluttony and idleness; and we found ourselves something of a distraction from the family politics and bouts of bickering. We were happy to play the role - despite this our hosts were good company. Bass Lake was beautiful, clean and on the edge of one of America's national jewels, the Sierras, and I will be forever grateful for the effort they made to take us into Yosemite. I was stunned to find myself inside images which Ansel Adams had imprinted into my childhood mind. I still have a false fingernail I found there, in among the pine cones and the hundreds of family 4x4s.

On the final day, I watched a strange family ritual. The "log cabin" (centrally-heated wooden house) in the woods by the lake that the family owned had a deck and a large picture window, in front of which was a picnic bench. Too cold for picnicking, but not for Mr and Mrs Raccoon and their five children, who delighted us by making short work of the Thanksgiving remains. Chunks of meat remaining on the massive corpse of Reginald Clarkesonville were swiftly and nimbly consumed by these clever, resilient, confident omnivores, and we sat entranced, youngest to oldest, observing this timeless scene.



In Britain, with our different history, Thanksgiving is neither in our calendar, nor our nature. We wait until Christmas at the end of the year to stop work, gather families around a meal table, get drunk, suffer collective indigestion and fight, but it would be wrong to think we don't need an equivalent holiday. As a nation, we need more to complain - after all, it's something we're very practised at - and I feel it would be an entirely good thing for us to have an annual excuse to moan, getting things off our chest and achieving an early catharsis. That way, when Christmas arrived, we'd be so much happier already.