American Thanksgiving.

Joel and Adriel are Americans.

So every year, they invite all their English friends and any Americans who are missing home to an absolutely massive Thanksgiving feast on American Thanksgiving. There was turkey, sweet potato casserole, mashed potatoes, stuffing, pumpkin pie (a phenomenon not heard of in Britain; everyone raved about the exotic dessert!), and lots of cornbread and gravy.

But since thirty people had to be fed, Joel and Adriel have been working for a week or more to get all the food prepped. We made seven pies - I got to do the part when you hold the pie in the air, and then run a knife around the edge to cut all the extra pastry off, which was very fun. Joel put the two monstrous turkeys in vats to soak in a special brine overnight to made them uber-moist and flavourful. And Adriel made a sweet potatoe casserole with marshmallows on top, which I told her was weird, but she said -'No, it's not weird, it's different. You are the foreigner here, my girl.'. My job was mostly goforing - I would go for any thing that they needed from the store, which proved challenging sometimes; my search for cornmeal finally took me to a speciality Indian food mart.

Most of the prep work was done at Joel and Adriel's flat, but the actual meal was going to be served at St Lukes, the church that we attend. St Lukes is up a very big hill. Lugging large amounts of carbohydrates up a hill is almost a legimate excuse for eating excessive amounts of carbohydrates. Almost.

But the meal was so worth it! We ate in the sanctuary of this beautiful old church lit only with candles. A lot of the people who came were not Christians; you could tell when they came in they were a little freaked out by the fact that they were in a church, but as the evening progressed, they relaxed and opened up in the warm atmosphere. That was lovely to see.

Joel and Adriel very specifically planned this as not only a time of fellowship, but of outreach. The popular conception of the Church is that it is a club of supercilious hypocrites who condemn and hate anyone opposed to them, and many people in this city have been hurt personaly in their experience of the church. So the fact that we - an oddly assorted mix of missionaries, agnostics, homosexuals, and christians and hedonists - enjoyed a lovely meal and shared jokes and anecdotes and good fellowship in the sanctuary of a church for hours and hours was a wonderful and marvellous thing, that I am convinced only God could bring about.

One of the things that Brighton needs most is unity; most of the churches don't do a lot of things together, and most view the others suspiciously. The same may be said of the people of Brighon, so this meal was especially apropos.

It was a wonderful night. But I don't think that I am tempted to start celebrating American Thanksgiving in Canada; two turkeys in one month are too much for me.

Now, the dishes are still to be reckoned with...