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Our whirlwind five-day trip to my sister’s home in western Illinois for Thanksgiving turned out to be the perfect warm-up to our celebration of Christmas. Not only did we have the opportunity to spend time with cherished loved ones in a place where our family has celebrated many Thanksgivings over the past three decades, but we also got to experience a bit of Christmas around the world.
That’s because my sister’s son, David, a non-traditional student at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C. where he now lives, brought along with him a group of six international students to enjoy their first American Thanksgiving.
This is in no way a new thing for our family. Our parents had a gift for hospitality and we grew up regularly hosting missionaries, friends of my mother from her Bible college days in Omaha and new friends from around the country in our home. Then when my older siblings went off the work and college after high school, they continued the tradition by bringing their friends home for a stay on our South Dakota farm.
Looking back I realize that by pestering our guests with questions, it became a way for me to virtually visit places I could then only dream of going myself. When I grew up I put my well-honed pestering skills to work in conducting interviews for newspaper and radio stories. Through the years I have had the opportunity to see the world through the eyes of people from many lands. And through “Christmas Around the World” interviews, I have learned much about Christmas traditions in far flung places like Honduras, New Zealand and countries in Eastern Europe.
Therefore, it felt natural to interact with these six delightful young people from Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and Belgium, to hear the music of their various accents and to listen to them talk about their homelands. Due to my wife’s medical condition, when we travel we have extra things to pack, and when we arrived the three men of the group were part of a group who helped me unload the car in record time. Also, far from being a burden to their hosts, the whole group pitched in with cooking and cleanup and just about anything else that needed doing around the house or the venue where we celebrated Thanksgiving on Friday.
Although we were only together for four days, by the end we felt like we made new lifetime friends. We won’t soon forget big 6-foot-4 Tim from Germany with his booming Arnold Schwarzenegger voice and accent (“Get to da choppah!”), his hearty laugh and quit-witted sense of humor. We also enjoyed getting to know his Austrian friend, Laurin, as well as Ben, who is from the northern part of Belgium, where they speak Dutch. Both were happy to talk about the traditional foods and customs of Christmas in their homelands.
The three ladies in the group included Katharina (Katie to us) from Austria, Louise (pronounced Louisa) also from the Dutch part of Belgium and Meike (it’s pronounced like Micah from the Bible but she went by “Mickey” while with us) from the Netherlands.
On Saturday morning the ladies of the group treated us all to breakfast, cooking up Dutch Pannenkoeken, a thin pancake that’s eaten rolled up like a crepes. Meike also made Boterkoek (Dutch butter cake). It was amazing! I mean how can you go wrong with a recipe that calls for almost an entire cup of butter?
The consistency is not really like cake, but more like a cookie and it tastes a bit like those Royal Dansk Danish butter cookies people give at Christmastime that come in the blue tins that usually get turned into sewing kits. I got her recipe and plan on making a batch of it for our Christmas. They also served toast spread with a generous amount of butter and topped with fruit- or chocolate-flavored sugar sprinkles that came out of little boxes bearing the brand name “De Ruijter.”
In visiting with them I learned a few things about European geography and customs that I had not realized before. For instance, we learned that the nation we call Holland hasn’t officially been called that for the past five years. Holland – what we Americans think of as the land of windmills and tulips where people wear wooden shoes – is actually just a region of the nation known today as the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
Incidentally, the Dutch word Netherlands means low country (low in elevation and flat), and when I showed Meike some of my drone videos of Nebraska scenery she remarked that it looked like her homeland.
My point in sharing our Thanksgiving experience with you is to illustrate how opening up holiday celebrations to people from other countries, cultures and languages can enrich your experience and expand your horizons. When we open our homes and hearts in a spirit of hospitality, we not only make new friends who don’t sound like us, but we also open ourselves to receive what they have to offer us in return.
And now, as my new friend Tim would say in his native tongue, “Frohe Weihnachten!”
RON BURTZ can be reached at newsregister@hamilton.net