Thataway to Thanksgiving Day

It is a hard thing to realize that China, and other countries here in the Far East, do not celebrate western holidays, not even the great American holiday of Thanksgiving! Since Thanksgiving is a wonderful holiday of family togetherness, this can be a rough time for those far away from home. But fear not, there is a great institution that can alleviate the holiday worries: the local LDS Branch! Thanksgiving needs to be celebrated with lots of food and friendly people and the Nanjing Branch of the Shanghai District stepped in to save the day.
For weeks before the actual event, sign up sheets were passed around to help make the Thanksgiving party a success. Sign up sheets to contribute to the turkey fund and sheets to sign up for other assorted dishes. The sheets came around three times, so my wonderful wife signed us up for three things!
Here I have to make an interjection. The branch party was not held on the actual Thanksgiving Day, which of course is a Thursday, but instead on the following Saturday. Our actual Thanksgiving Day was as follows:

Mainly, the day was full of work. Jenn was working for the English school she teaches at, passing out flyers at a school for adults for an English class for the elderly. She was engaged in this work for multiple hours a day and it was a little dull. Having Thanksgiving be a day full of meaningless work did not seem like an appropriate way to spend it, so we were planning to at least have lunch together.
Finding my way out to Jenn's work took quite a while, as it was a ways out from our normal routes through the city. Finally, after making it to the appointed bus stop, I was greeted by the girlfriend of the boss of the english school, who I later learned was only 19, on her scooter, ready to take me to lunch. She informed me that we were going to have lunch together. Great, I thought, she is going to join Jenn and me for lunch. I rode on the back of her scooter, not sure how to hold on for support. We got to a restaurant and walked up an extremely narrow staircase to the upper seating area in the restaurant. Here I saw a couple of separate rooms for groups to eat in, most of them filled with people talking and eating loudly, with plenty of cigarette smoke and alcohol going around. The the woman leads me into exactly that kind of room. Inside I see the boss of the English school, another women and two men, with short hair, cigarettes in hand and wearing leather jackets. And then Jenn, who was sitting in the midst of them, obviously somewhat lost among these people who did not speak English.
This was our Thanksgiving lunch, very different from what we had imagined. Here we were, sitting in a smoke filled room with a couple of Chinese strangers (Jenn was told about one of the men, that "he is not a good guy"), enjoying mysterious food. The whole scene was just very odd, to say the least.
Then the whole thing changed a little bit. The boss, having hired wives of flagship students as English teachers before, understood that we were Mormons. He told the others in the room to put out the cigarettes, because we don't smoke. He also told the others that we don't drink tea and coffee or alcohol. So, for the rest of the lunch, the conversation was about our church. We talked about the Sabbath day, the word of wisdom and other things. Overall, the boss seemed to really like us. He said multiple times that "Mormon men are good people!" and "Mormon women are great!". I definitely did not expect our Thanksgiving lunch to be with a bunch of strangers, but I must admit that, in the end, we had a very interesting and good time. If anything, we gave the boss another impression that Mormons are good people!

Now, back to the Thanksgiving party.

The day of the party arrived, and our biggest job was to make mashed potatoes for a bunch of people! We needed a few ingredients that are not readily available in the middle Kingdom: cream cheese, butter, whipping cream (Jenn also signed up for whipped cream). Luckily, there is a solution in the form of the German version of Costco available, Metro! We pilgrimaged up to the yellow and blue wonderland. After a short while we returned with almost all the needed ingredients.
The time until the party was spent preparing the food. Without previous experience, Jenn whipped up some quite amazing mashed potatoes, using a empty soda bottle full of water as a masher, and we were all set to go.

The party was great. We had over a hundred people at the party, which meant that there were about 20 people per turkey. Through a Thanksgiving miracle though, we not only had enough turkey, but plenty of leftovers. We had a great time. The food was plenty and delicious and we were all filled.
The party also included a talent show, and we enjoyed a lineup of very interesting and amusing performances. A medley of scripture mastery songs, "I want a Hippopotamus for Christmas", a poem called the "love window", comedic acting and more.

At the end of the day we returned home, with leftovers in our possession and happily fed. Now we are ready for Christmas (especially with our brand new advent calendar)!