As an American expat who has been living in England for the past twenty-five years, I struggle with holidays. I miss my American family even though I have both family and friends here, too. I miss the familiarity of the traditions I grew up with and then passed on to my children, and I find they can be hard to articulate. Thanksgiving, in particular, doesn’t translate well, in part because it morphs from year to year, even for those Americans who stay close to their homes and families. The faces around the table change with births, deaths, and marriages. Food tastes and fashions evolve. We change the way we do things.

But underneath those obvious changes, two things always weave below the surface of Thanksgiving: tradition and thankfulness. When I wake up on Thanksgiving morning, I can sense other families stirring, sense that others are beginning to prepare their feasts, whatever they will be eating. While I might be alone in my kitchen I always feel like I am cooking in community that day.

We cooked a mini-feast this year. It was just the two of us, but we wanted the day to be as cosy and meaningful as we could make it – and I didn’t want to be exhausted at the end of the day. We have much to be thankful for this year – we have just passed an important anniversary; last year at this time we were in America where my husband was recovering from a medical emergency and had just been discharged from hospital following major surgery and two weeks in intensive care. We all knew how lucky he was to have survived.

Oddly, he started craving peach juice. That is something we don’t have in the UK and he admitted he had never tasted it, but he knew he wanted it. Our older grandchildren went out on the hunt – peach juice isn’t easy to find, even in America. When they came home with a bottle of chilled juice, it was as good as he had imagined. So we sent those grandchildren out for more. And more.

As she prepared our family’s traditional pigs-in-blankets for breakfast on Thanksgiving morning, my daughter purloined some of the peach juice and made spontaneous Bellinis – a stroke of brilliance and fun that will forever be a symbol of the miracle of life that we experienced in 2023.

Peach juice is even harder to source in England – on Wednesday we traipsed through five different supermarkets in search of anything remotely peachy. We did – finally – find some. But my personal miracle of the day was looking down at the black boots that I was wearing over my jeggings. I hadn’t been able to wear them – or any shoe with a heel – in more than three years. I had injured my knee so severely that walking at all was difficult for many many months and painful for even longer, and I haven’t been able to wear shoes with any heel at all. I had opted for prayer, patience and gentle exercise rather than the injections or knee replacement that I was offered. Wearing my boots and dashing through shops this week felt like another miracle, the miracle of mobility. That moment of noticing my boots and feeling my own vitality will be with me forever. Sometimes it is the little things that touch us most deeply and remind us of how much we have to be thankful for.

We lit a fire on Thanksgiving to warm the house, cooked a chicken and a few Anglicized sides using British ingredients, and drank peach Bellinis. Our hearts were full.