Halloween came to Paris while we lived there in the mid- to late 1990s, and now seems likely to remain:

A patina of pumpkins colors the streets, and while the business of kids dressing as demons to demand unearned sugar troubles what remains of the French Catholic conscience, Halloweens essential role is to be the opening salvo of the holiday season. And though Pre Nol remains ascetic-looking and gaunt compared with the rotund American materialist Santa Claus, the Christmas holiday he superintends in France is ever more like ours and less like theirs wasmore of a commercial potlatch and less a feast in many ways tragic. (The baby, after all, will die; the best French Baroque Christmas music, like Charpentiers famous Os, is most often sad.) Between these two holidays comes Thanksgiving, and that was hard to find, or, for that matter, make. Thanksgiving still has no place in France, which made my wife and me sad when we lived there, because it has always been our favorite holiday. There isnt even a word for it; or, rather, there is only a long phrase, borrowed from French Canada, where its a legal holiday, though celebrated much earlier in the calendar: la fte de lAction de grces, or the feast of the action of grace! (Though in my Canadian childhood, I never once heard it used: Thanksgiving was what it was called. In Quebec.) We wanted to celebrate Thanksgiving in Paris because its always been one of our favorite holidays, for reasons that take a moments unpacking. In one of his early novels, Letting Go, Philip Roth has a chapter, called The Power of Thanksgiving, where he celebrates the November Thursday as the one high secular holiday equally open to people of faith and nonbelieversor, more poignantly in his narrators case, to Jews just as much as the goyim. (Thanksgiving is a whole subject in Roth; the cruelest thing Portnoy does to his parents is not show up when he goes to college, in order to visit his girlfriends impeccably WASP holiday house.) Thats part of it, for me, that sense of common ownership. But it was also more personal. Thanksgiving turkey was the first big thing I ever made for company, the first dish that involved brining and roasting and basting, all those happy participles of full-time cooking engagement. Chicken breasts and filet of salmon, tortellini, and quick-fix curriesall the poky young-couple dishes had been my previous mainstays, but that was like dangling your feet in the wading pool. Thanksgiving was my first dive into the demands of making a real dinner, a feast with a small halo of grace but mostly harried action. In 1987, we invented a Thanksgiving for a collection of strays in New Yorkdear friends without homes nearby to go toand it had become the best time of the year. We wanted to go on with the tradition while in Paris. Oh, and a terrible admission, in its way: My wife loves roast turkey. Really loves it, more than any other mealroast turkey with bread stuffing, candied carrots, Brussels sprouts, and mashed sweet potatoes, what Portnoys mother might have called the whole megillah. Calvin Trillins rueful joke about preferring something with a little more garlicsay, spaghetti carbonarawas lost on her. She truly loves the mealit is part of the Canadian girl in her. (This is the way life is; the minx you seduced in her parents basement turns out to be an enforcer of Canadian recipes.) The first effort we made in Paris to have a Thanksgiving feast was to go to Allard, the old bistro on the Rue St-Andr-des-Arts, where we had pheasant with baconand-chestnut stuffing. It was good but not really Thanksgivingish, so our next move was to buy a real, full French turkey. It came complete with an explanation of its origins and was absolutely delicious. The carrots I made alongside it, too, had a crisp, orange tang, and werent mushy nor bland. It was a good dinner. What we couldnt do was get our French friends to quite see the point of the holiday, despite their patient, amused attendance. A harvest holiday? Not exactly; post-harvest really. I didnt even want to raise the issue of the Pilgrims and Indians, since, once told, it is so clearly and chillingly a tale of a bigger swindle on the wayjust sit down with us! Lets share the table and the country! What was it that made it matter so much, absent friends and absent dishes aside? And why was it so absent not just as a holiday but also as a concept in our adopted country? Ive brooded on it now for years, and I think I have a piece of the answer. Holiday feasts, it seems to anthropologistsor me pretending to be onecome in two kinds: There are reversal feasts, and there are renewal feasts. (Anthropologists sometimes refer to easy and uneasy festivals to catch this distinction.) We either celebrate the world turned upside down, the reversal of our normal expectations, or we celebrate the renewal of our regular order. Halloween is the perfect example of a reversal feast: The things you are never allowed to do over the course of a yearkids going door to door, ringing doorbells, demanding treats, wearing masksare not only allowed for one night but encouraged. The Fourth of July (or the Second of July in Canada) is the perfect example of a renewal feast. The point of these renewal feasts is to remind us of why the organization and structure of our society are the way they arenot only how they came into being but why they are revered and allowed, why they are right. New Years Eve is a reversal feastlicense to get drunkwhile Christmas is a bit of both: a reversal of the usual ritual (i.e., kids first) and a renewal of family bonds (we try and try and try to love our relatives).

Thanksgiving is the greatest American renewal feast, the one that celebrates most clearly the continuity of our country: It depends on having exactly the same thing, in families of all faiths, year after year. Trillins joke about replacing turkey with spaghetti carbonara is so funny because its a taboo breaker. You couldnt make the same joke about Christmas dinner, because some Italian families do have spaghetti carbonara, or another pasta dish, that night. While reversal festivals can be a little loose around the edges, renewal festivals have to be rigid and tightly structured; if they werent always the same you wouldnt know that the old was being renewed. And then it occurred to me: The French dont really have renewal feasts, or at least they have fewer of them than any other people I know of. Nowhere in the French calendar is there a true renewal festival. The French Fourth of Julythe fete national, Bastille Dayis staunchly Republican, and in that sense partisan. Christmas in France is being Americanized, but it still keeps that tragic Catholic core. The absence of an obvious renewal feast in France, though, is a sign not that France is somehow dour but that the custom has migrated elsewhere. Rites missed in one place always rise in another. Renewal feasts are favored by new countries, in need of obvious celebrations, as if we were uneasy about our woven-together nature. Old countries need reversal feasts to break the stifling order of the pastand so for them their renewal feasts are implicit in every days action. Every good dinner in France is a kind of renewal feast, I realized: What I love about French civilization is the lack of a neat line between a formal feast and a daily dinner. Ours are pulled-together holidays, artfully constructed to take in as many fundamentally unlike kinds as we can; the poor turkey is sacrificed by the millions every November to the illusion of unity. French holidays come from an indistinct past and supply a sense of continuity even when they are meant to be disruptive. Dinner itself is the renewal feast of French life. Once I grasped that subtler truth, from that moment on, I stopped trying to persuade French friends to join us for the holiday. Instead, I asked them over for an unnamed November dinner, which was in itself sufficiently odd, sufficiently quaintwith its marriage of fruits and meats, sweet and savoryto justify and make it an occasion. When, a few years later, an American friend in London started to invite us to celebrate the occasion there, we enjoyed it: There were only a handful of Americans and Canadians, ornamented by a few watching Brits. London Thanksgiving felt like the secret Seder of the Marannos; Paris Thanksgiving felt merely, and not merely, like a meal. If I went back now to France, I would never try and do Thanksgiving; I would make a brined turkey, and carrots, and violate the laws of sweet and savory by adding cranberry sauce, and just call it dinner. Thanksgiving without its dressing is also delicious; the ritual can be served as a side, because it is already, so to speak, baked into the continuities of the table. This year well be in New York, eating for pleasure; but a part of me would still rather be in Paris, giving for thanks. The moral remains the same even where the name of the feast cant be found: The action of grace takes place at the table.