First off, thank you Gwen Stefani for making sure I never misspell bananas.
But did you know that banana with out the “b” is just a pineapple?

Being immigrants, Thanksgiving was never a really big deal growing up.
Thanksgiving, for us, was when everything was closed so we couldn’t really do anything.
In fact, when we were living in Hawaii, Thanksgiving was the time that the Korean pastors and their families would get together on a different island for a quick getaway. Though, I don’t know how fun one could have because Korean immigrant pastors aren’t the funnest people to be around…
I’d never go because I knew if I had gone I’d be stuck babysitting, since I was the oldest of PKs (pastor’s kid).
So Thanksgiving in Hawaii would be just me and my brother watching TV and what not.
… I think we had a “traditional” Thanksgiving dinner once during my childhood when someone invited us over…
I think my wife’s experience may have been similar.

However, our first Thanksgiving together as a married couple, we decided that we wanted to have the good ole American experience.

We were gonna cook a turkey, make some stuffing, get some pumpkin pie along with rice, kimchi, and… shrimp. By “we”, I mean my wife. My job was 1) be an errand boy and 2) not get in her way.

The recipe that my wife got for the turkey called for the turkey to be wrapped in banana leaves.
We had no idea what banana leaves were.
And mind you, kids, this was before we could google crap on our phone.
“It probably means banana peels, right?” I don’t know which one of us came to that conclusion, but the other one agreed.
So I went and picked up a bunch of bananas.
We peeled them and covered the turkey in banana peels!

The turkey, as I recall, still came out great.
It didn’t taste banana-y at all.
I can’t, for the life of me, remember what we did with the bananas though.
It wasn’t until the next day or so when we learned that banana leaves were, in fact, a real thing.
Guess you learn new stuff all the time…

That dinner was still a success — if anything, we got to spend it with family… and a story to tell about that one time we covered an entire raw turkey with banana peels.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.
It may not be the Thanksgiving we expected, hoped for, and/or wanted.
But may hope still be instilled in you and may you still find blessings to reflect on.