Our friend Willy has a lovely place in the Cotswolds that on occasion we visit. Set amidst the fields of “rural England”, it is a great escape from the city. This year, Lee and I decided it would be a great place to go for Thanksgiving.
It’s funny, when I first moved to the UK, I always knew that Thanksgiving was distinctly American, but I had no idea how little Brits knew about the ways of my people. Without fail, if I ventured into a cab or a cafe on Thanksgiving day and the waiter or the cabbie picked up on my accent, they would immediatley launch into a series of questions. “It’s Thanksgiving, eh? Why aren’t you home?” to the more deeper question, “What’s it all about?”
That answer to that question (for me) itself is the heart of why Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. It’s about giving thanks for what we have and spending it with the people that we are closest with. Pretty straight to the point. Thanksgiving IS my favorite holiday for a number of reasons. I love turkey and stuffing. I enjoy polishing off a nice bottle of wine. I’m not too keen on NFL, but that’s beside the point. Most importantly–no one has REALLY been able to successfully cash in on Thanksgiving. For all the commercialism that America is about, Thanksgiving remains a relatively untapped resource, and frankly I LOVE IT!
It’s difficult to get excited about pictures of turkeys or swatches of brown, cream, orange and mustard. It’s nearly impossible to catapult pilgrims and Native Americans into the league of St. Nick and of course there is always Christmas right around the corner. Still, all of these come together as the reason Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday.
This year our friend Kwong was visiting from Seattle. We thought it would be a great time to nip away from the city and enjoy some fresh air. I’d been in Oxford shooting some executives and was just a few miles from Will’s place. Lee and Kwong met up with me later in the evening and we settled into country life.
Will’s place is located just outside Burford in an area that was once owned by Lord Redesdale, probably most famous now not for himself, but for his daughters–The Mitford Girls, six “IT-girls” of the 20′s and 30′s. Our friend Jo Baxendale once lent me their biography and it was fantastic. Pure toilet reading with a bit of history thrown in. Upper-class Brits with Nazis, Communists, Guinness and Churchill all in one family.
Lee and I have been to Will’s place a number of times, and whenever possible, I enjoy taking a walk through the woods, deeper into the countryside and into a little village called Swinbrook, a perfect English village. It’s got the church. It’s got the manor house. There’s a red phone box and a little brook. Most importantly, however, is the pub–The Swan. Apparently when Lord Redesdale died, he handed the keys of the pub over to the landlord, making him the freehold owner outright. Whatever the story is, this little pub is delightful. It’s verging on twee (see Brit dictionary for that word–think white geese with blue bonnets on), but it is truly a lovely place. Good food and good beer.
We had a couple of pints
, some nice nosh and then walked our way back to the house. It was a fantastic Thanksgiving day.
