November 1 and Turkey Day approaches. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday because it’s all about sharing time with people we love. There are no other distractions, like presents or egg hunts. Just family and whatever friends land at our table. (Well, my dad's table. Not mine, for reasons that will soon be obvious.) November also makes me remember one very particular Thanksgiving dinner.

Way back when, I spent my junior year of University in Dijon, France, in a French language program for foreign students with lots and lots of people from all over the world. With the holiday approaching, my American compatriots and I decided to host a Thanksgiving dinner party for our friends to share our traditions. It was a great idea but the reality was slightly more complicated. We were all 19, 20, 21. Not one of us knew how to cook. This was before cell phones and internet. Reference materials were limited and there was no phoning home to mom for advice. Overall we did not clearly think this plan through before inviting a bunch of people to dinner.

Nevertheless, the menu was created & dishes assigned. I got pumpkin pies because I had made one once, from canned pumpkin pie product and frozen pie shells. There was some mixing involved, but overall it was pretty simple and I thought easy-peasy.

The following is the chain of events as I recall them.

•Go to grocery store and find frozen pie crusts but search for canned Libby’s Pumpkin Pie mix to no avail.

•Ask store employee for help but discover that I do not know the word for pumpkin and am not THAT good at charades.

•Search French/English dictionary for the word for pumpkin. Find a word that means roughly “gourd”. No dice, but one very amused employee suggests that “gourds” might be found in the weekly outdoor market.

•Stop to ponder the thought that I am in way, way, way over my head and am going to have to make the pie. As in make it from scratch. Totally from scratch.

•Deep breath. This should be interesting. (A smarter girl would have suggested a different desert at this moment.)

•Scour the market, interrogate numerous elderly market vendors. Find one green, roundish gourd thingy that has been cut in half to display orange interior.

•Sniff the gourd, decide that this is as good as it gets and make purchase along with a bunch of spices that smelled sort of right.

•Return to dorm to figure out how to reduce my gourd down to pumpkin pie filling. My tools: one knife, one bowl, one pot and a hot plate burner in the communal kitchen with one heat setting and a button that had to be pushed every 5 minutes to keep it on.

•(Let’s just skip the next four hours and say that it was not pretty.)

•Gather pie crust and resultant gourd filling. Get on the bus to the house where the pie will be cooked.

•Walk into chaos caused by the fact that, as it turns out, French turkeys are small. They are small because French ovens are small. There are two turkeys. One turkey has been squashed into the oven. It is cube shaped. The second waits to follow. Total cooking time line destroyed. My pie has been bumped.

•Gather group around the table to stare at pie components, completely nonplussed by turn of events.

•American with available oven identified on the other end of town. Two bus rides later, involving MANY stares and whispers from local commuters, the pie is in the oven.

•Struck by thought that I have no idea how long it needs to cook.

•Realize that it does not matter anyway. It has 30 minutes to cook and then it’s back on the bus to return to the party house before the guests arrive. The pie will have to finish, if need be, when the oven is free. (Those reading who know anything about food safety are now shuddering. I accept that.)

•Two pies eventually make it back into an oven and bake. And bake and bake. Or rather don’t bake. At least not into anything pumpkin pie like.

•People of various nationalities bravely scoop up pumpkin sludge and say things like “Yummy!” and “Wow!” and “May I have the recipe, please”. In French. Proving that the ability to "BS" for the sake of politeness is global.

•A fellow hostess hands me a glass of wine and says "Oh well. No one is dead and no one is bleeding. No biggie." And then hands me another glass of wine.

•Return in the morning to help clean up house. Find a table full of women eating the pumpkin pie that sat slowly cooking with the oven pilot light all night and is beautiful. And delicious.

All in all, it was a Thanksgiving adventure. I learned some things. 1) I am stubborn. 2) I am somewhat creative. Not necessarily in an efficient manner, but if it needs to be done, I can get it done. 3) Really, it's not a crisis if not one is dead and no one is bleeding. I have totally embraced that philosophy. Sometimes to the great annoyance of those around me. 4) Finally, and most important, I have great friends and people are kind.

Wishing everyone memorable adventures as we more into the holiday season.