Harvest Dinner 2020
My family has always been unconventional when it comes to celebrating white-American holidays. On or near Thanksgiving, we’d usually kill two chickens (yes, we butcher and pluck them ourselves!) instead of the expected turkey to celebrate the Hmong New Year and honor our ancestors. After all, November is high-time for Hmong New Year celebrations since it’s traditionally the end of harvest season back in Thailand or Laos.
Atypical to our standards though, we had the turkey this year. With the chickens. But instead of two, we had five.
My sisters decided that instead of celebrating on the Thursday of Thanksgiving, we’d do the traditional American dinner with a turkey, stuffing, some mashed potatoes and gravy, and some other good ol’ American dishes on Friday (for reasons I still don’t know of). Then on Saturday, my mom went forth with her traditional shaman rituals of welcoming our ancestors’ spirits into our house for a dinner of “harvest” (we don’t necessarily harvest things here in the States at this time of November, hence the chickens).
The American dinner was great, but I’d just recovered from what felt like a weird hangover that emanated from absolutely no alcohol intake whatsoever, so I had nearly zero appetite. On Saturday though, I was entirely stuffed with boiled chicken. If you were to know one fact about me, it’s that nqaij vom — traditional Hmong boiled chicken — is my absolute favorite soul food of all time.
All in all, having two massive dinners two nights in a row still has me quite full as I continue to reel from all the savory tastes of this weekend. This Harvest Dinner was just as strange to us as this year was, but it was worth it all the same :)
