Today was Thanksgiving! A true feast holiday. You know how Christmas is about celebrating the birth of Christ and there's all the angels and stuff, New year's eve is about a new start and new year's resolutions... Well, Thanksgiving is about turkey and pumpkin pie! With Christmas in Estonia, people often comment about overeating on different holiday dishes, but it's really not what it's about. But whenever I had the conversation about celebrating my first thanksgiving here, people's reaction was - "there will be SOOOO MUCH FOOD! You'll love it!".
I actually did a 1-minute background check because I thought Thanksgiving must have had another theme when it first started, but no, not really. Thanksgiving is a harvest celebration. So basically it's "We give our thanks for having so much food. Now lets overeat!" 
Rachel covered with scary dough!The first half of the day was spent watching the Macy's Day Parade and cooking. That's the tradition. Macy's is a chain of general stores. They sell anything from electronics to pianos. And every year they spend a ton of money funding a parade that's filmed right in front of their store in New York city. It's like a cheerful parade with many orchestras, but also HUUUUGE helium cartoon characters and people doing saltos and stuff. I loved the smurf balloon. The commentator said that "The size of this smurf is so big, that it could fit 30 000 smurfs inside, since a smurf is supposed to be 3 apples tall."
And we cooked a traditional Estonian Apple-Farmer's Cheese Crumble cake (õuna-kohupiima purukook) with plenty of cinnamon. Plus we made sour kraut with pork and banana corn bread. 
We finished the cake! Success!We spent Thanksgiving dinner with my friend's gay friends and it was really fun. They were, like, soooo gay!
There were more guys than girls there and I'm pretty sure none of them were straight. They were great though. They had this nice gay body language. The apartment was decorated with good style and there were nice paintings on the walls. The gay guy who lived there had some of the coolest kitchenware! Like he had this cheese grinder and he made the best cheese biscuits I've ever had.Rachel's friends were really nice relaxed people. I loved the jokes with bananas and nuts.
I had actually expected it to be quite awkward because I hadn't met any of those people before, but it was a very easygoing event and very accepting group of people. Lovely. 
I wasn't really used to seeing guys casually leaning over each other in a semi-flirty way or anything like that, but it's not like I minded any of that. It was actually a refreshingly different sight from what I'm used to.
Food!MOUNTAINS OF FOOD!
People were just bringing more and more of it and we ate until we were stuffed and then people were reminding each other, "leave room for dessert!" and then we watched a movie and waited a little and then had so much dessert that people were groaning again. But I actually can't eat so much at a time, so about an hour after dessert I had my eye on the turkey. 
And soon afterwards, when I thought that people will start drinking now, we gathered some leftovers, packed our things and went home. A surprisingly big amount of our apple cheese cake was eaten and we were complimented because they liked it. Sour kraut seemed less of a hit, probably because it was too salty (we only added salt to the pork), and everyone loved Rachel's tasty banana corn bread. 
Best turkey ever!Weird thing - what they call cranberry sauce is actually round slices of cranberry juice jello things that look like slices of beetroot. Taste was okay though. Nothing like "pohlamoos", which is our traditional holiday feast mountain cranberry (or cowberry) jam with actual berries inside!
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