The fourth Thursday of November means its Thanksgiving here and the official start to the holiday season (that lasts until 1st January).

Thanksgiving has been celebrated in America since the English settlers arrived in the 17th Century. The most famous one seems to be the one in Plymouth (Massachusetts) in 1621 (however there were others before this and the earlier Spanish settlers had them in the 16th Century). Here the settlers gave thanks for the food they had managed to grow and the help they had received from the native American Indians (and in return they appear to have relieved them of their land and gave them a few casinos).

Thanksgiving is full of traditions, the main ones being:

- Thanksgiving Day parade

- Turkey for dinner

- American Football games

- A re-run of A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving

The Houston Thanksgiving Day Parade took place downtown just by Minute Maid Park (home of the Houston Astros MLB team).

This was an opportunity for that essential US industry, the oversized inflatable advertising product manufacturers, to show their stuff:

With that over, it was time to go home and prepare the Thanksgiving dinner.

Now if you like your turkey roasted then how about trying it deep-fried instead? That does seem to be the most popular method here.

To deep-fry a turkey you need one of these; its an outdoor stove powered by propane or similar.

Peanut oil is the lubricant of choice for this operation and Kroger conveniently stock both the stove and the peanut oil (in 5 gallon drums) together at this time of year.

Whilst roasting a turkey is a slow and relatively safe process, deep-frying one is quite quick (around an hour for a typical family-sized bird) but much more exciting. Here are just some of the safety tips you can find before deep-frying turkey:

    -Ensure a fire extinguisher rated for flammable liquids is readily available.

    -Use heavy gloves or oven mitts and wear a long-sleeve shirt.

    -Do not consume alcohol during the process.

    -There is also a possibility that an overheated turkey fryer can explode.

So there you go. Makes cooking the family dinner more entertaining than in England.

The NFL Thanksgiving Classic has three American Football games taking place on Thanksgiving Day. Two are hosted by the same teams every year (The Detroit Lions, who got beaten by the Tennessee Titans in their the biggest Thanksgiving defeat ever, 47-10, and The Dallas Cowboys, who beat the Seattle Seahawks 34-9). A third game is hosted by a team selected by the NFL each year (this year the Philadelphia Eagles played the Arizona Cardinals, The Eagles won 48-20). Since American Football games can easily last 3 or 4 hours watching these three can seriously affect what else you can do on Thanksgiving Day.

And to wrap up Thanksgiving Day, there’s the re-run of A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. Originally aired in 1973 this one was directed by Phil Roman who is perhaps now more famous for producing the Simpsons. And here it is from YouTube:

Thanksgiving Day is only one part of the Thanksgiving holiday. Most people have the following day off as a holiday too and this has its own traditions.

The day following Thanksgiving Day is known these days as Black Friday, so called because its supposed to be one of the busiest shopping days in the year and the day that stores go from in the red to in the black financially (although the origin of the name is apparently from Philadelphia and refers to the heavy traffic on that day).

On Black Friday stores open at 5am (or earlier) and people line up for hours before hand to get the “doorbuster” (special offer) deals. Sadly the term doorbuster was taken literally in New York state where 2,000 shoppers broke the door down to get into a Wal-Mart 5 minutes before it was due to open and killed a member of staff in the process. No bargain is worth that.

As well as shopping the other tradition (in our street at least) is to sweep the yard (or garden as it would be called in England). There appear to be two methods for doing this in our street:

    -Using a rake and sweeping the leaves into a pile then collecting them up in bags for disposal.

    -Using a blower to blow the leaves off your yard and either onto the street or your neighbour’s yard.

As we are without a blower we were forced to do it the hard way. Unfortunately the next day it looked no different, but the bin was at least full of leaves.