WWW: Food, Festivals, and Feelings: Less than a week until Turkey Day!

¡Feliz viernes a todos!

Thanks for joining me again this week! I can almost smell all the delicious foods being prepared at home already! Can’t you? I hope you and your students are getting excited to celebrate the holiday in your own special ways.  This week, I am featuring a few resources that highlight the ways in which Thanksgiving coincides with Harvest Festivals throughout the world.

The first resource is from Eatocracy and it shows some beautiful images of how Thanksgiving foods in different parts of the United States have been adapted to include more Latin American ingredients.  For example, the first picture on the page shows the Castillo-Lavergne Family’s Turkey Pasteles, which are wrapped green banana stuffed pastries.  This is the perfect display of how the traditional turkey platter can be transformed and included in other cultural dishes.  This article, creatively titled, “El Día de Las Gracias—Thanksgiving with a Latin Twist,” celebrates the coming together of flavors, families, and cultures across the United States.  We think this resource could easily be incorporated into class discussions of how students celebrate the holiday, what foods they have every year, and who gets to help with the cooking. The second and last two resources are photo collections of Thanksgiving celebrations from around the world.  The collections span from the United Kingdom and Canada to Korea, India, and Ghana!  What a great way to show Thanksgiving as more than just a “Pilgrims and Indians” story! The photographs help illustrate how other countries celebrate the holiday through diverse food, dress, and festival style.  It’s also interesting to see what each Thanksgiving equivalent holiday is called in other countries.  These resources show that Harvest Festivals and Thanksgiving celebrations are not unique to the United States alone!

We think these resources could easily be incorporated into the Thanksgiving discussion in class in order to give students a more globalized view of the holiday.  It would be a perfect way to incorporate diversity into the classroom, just by discussing these festivals and then talking about how individual families differ in their own celebrations of Thanksgiving, even if they live in the same neighborhood.  Here’s to having a few days to celebrate with family, friends, and a lot of great food! I hope the class discussions are as fruitful as the Thanksgiving spreads!

With warmest wishes,

Charla

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Image: Photo of Harvest Festival. Reprinted from Flickr user Angela Marie Henriette under CC ©.

 

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