I never imagined that my first proper Canadian Thanksgiving dinner would be spent with a Dutch-Canadian family whose connection to the Philippines began long before I was born. Yet there we were, my wife and I, sitting at their dining table, surrounded by people who had gradually become something more than friends.
There was roasted turkey, mashed potatoes, red cabbage, and dishes I had never really eaten this way before. My wife had brought an ube cake and lumpiang shanghai, two familiar Filipino offerings among the food our hosts had prepared. There was wine, conversation, and a warmth that had little to do with the heating inside their home.
It was a family gathering, the kind I had seen in movies and read about but never quite experienced myself.
And for an evening, we were part of it.
I remember feeling happy, but there was also something difficult to explain. Perhaps it was nostalgia for a celebration I had never experienced before. Perhaps it was the realization that, thousands of kilometres away from the Philippines, we had found people who made us feel that we belonged.
To explain how much that evening meant to me, though, I need to return to an ordinary Sunday a year earlier.
An unexpected meeting after church
My wife and I were standing in line after a Sunday worship service, waiting to greet the pastor along with the rest of the congregation.
An older woman approached us, apparently thinking she had met us somewhere before. She thought we were Latin Americans.
We explained that we were Filipinos, and that this was actually our first time meeting her.
Her reaction changed almost immediately.
She and her husband had spent several years in the Philippines, working with a church mission in Negros Occidental. They began saying a few Tagalog words, which surprised us. When we told them that we were from Iloilo, the conversation became even more interesting. We eventually found ourselves talking a little in Hiligaynon.
Imagine that. We were in a church in Edmonton, meeting an older Canadian couple for the first time, and somehow the conversation had brought us back to the Visayas.
I have always found these encounters fascinating. You leave your country, learn to make yourself understood in another language, and become accustomed to explaining where you come from. Then, unexpectedly, you meet people who know something about the place you once called home.
Not simply the Philippines as a country on a map, but the everyday life of its people.
We learned that the couple had lived in Negros Occidental for four years. Their work had taken place before their church established its first congregation in the area. Rather than focusing directly on preaching, they had worked on helping local communities improve their livelihoods.
The husband had a background in agriculture. He had worked with local agricultural authorities on crop production, raising laying chickens, and backyard hog farming. These were practical efforts, concerned with the ordinary needs of families trying to make a living.
I found that connection particularly meaningful.
Agriculture was such a familiar part of life in the Visayas. Here was someone who had come from Canada, spent years helping people in Negros, and could speak about things that were very much part of the world I grew up knowing.
Our conversation could have ended there, as so many pleasant conversations after church do.
But it didn’t.
They invited us to their home for lunch.
I remember being struck by how naturally the invitation came. We had only just met them, yet they were willing to bring us into their home and share a meal with us.
People inviting strangers into their home. It was such a simple thing, and yet it left an impression on me.
When strangers become family
That first lunch was only the beginning.
Over the following months, we grew closer. We shared more meals, sometimes with other friends from church. They invited us to sit with them during Sunday services and eventually began picking us up so we could attend church together.
We also introduced them to Jollibee, which was a rather different way of sharing something Filipino with people who had already spent years in our country.
What I appreciated most was how ordinary our friendship gradually became.
There was no grand announcement that we were now close. We simply kept seeing one another, sharing conversations, and becoming more comfortable in each other’s company.
They showed us kindness without making us feel that we had to earn it.
That distinction matters to me.
When you are an immigrant, you meet many people who are courteous and welcoming. You appreciate those encounters, especially when you are still finding your place in a new country. But friendship takes something more. It grows through the ordinary things people choose to do for one another.
An invitation to lunch. A place beside them at church. A ride on a Sunday morning. Someone remembering you and wanting to know how you’re doing.
Over time, these gestures become familiar. You stop thinking of yourself as someone they have kindly invited and begin thinking of them as people you genuinely look forward to seeing.
They started referring to us as their children, which I found rather amusing because of the difference in our ages. We had even called them Lolo and Lola before, although that seemed to change as our relationship developed.
I suppose family relationships do not always fit neatly into the names we give them.
What mattered was that we felt cared for.
And when Thanksgiving approached this year, they invited us to celebrate with their family.
Their eldest daughter was visiting from another province. She had spent part of her childhood in the Philippines during her parents’ missionary years. Their son would also be joining them.
It was an opportunity not only to celebrate Thanksgiving but to meet the children whose lives had also been shaped, in different ways, by their parents’ years in the Philippines.
We were delighted to be included.
A holiday I knew, but had never quite experienced
Thanksgiving was not entirely unfamiliar to me.
Growing up in the Philippines, I knew it primarily through the Protestant church. In our own congregation, we had a tradition of giving an offering of one peso for every year of our lives, a small expression of gratitude for another year we had been given.
Some churches held Thanksgiving celebrations around the time Americans observed the holiday. More recently, the word had also become familiar through shopping promotions and sales.
But Thanksgiving was never quite the family holiday for us that it seemed to be in North America.
For many Filipinos, I think Christmas Eve comes closer to that experience. We gather around the table for Noche Buena, prepare food that sometimes takes days of planning, and celebrate with the people closest to us. Gratitude, family, and the act of sharing a meal are already part of that tradition.
So I had an idea of what Thanksgiving was supposed to look like, largely from what I had encountered through American culture.
The turkey, in particular, fascinated me.
I had never eaten roasted turkey before, and the prospect of finally trying one felt like a small occasion in itself.
But I was looking forward to something much more meaningful than the food.
We would be spending the evening with people who had become our family in Canada.
When the day arrived, the husband offered to pick us up again. We tried to decline, not wanting to trouble him, but they insisted.
It was chilly outside, although the weather was pleasant enough. There were fewer cars on the road than usual. As we made our way to their house, my wife and I were feeling a little nervous.
We were about to spend an evening with an English-speaking family, and despite having lived in Canada for some time, we still worried about how naturally we would manage the conversations.
It’s a curious thing. You can speak English, work in English, and go about your daily life in English, yet still feel a little anxious when you know you’ll be spending several hours in conversation.
Perhaps it was because we wanted to make a good impression. Or because being invited into someone’s family celebration felt different from visiting them for an ordinary afternoon.
Whatever the reason, we were both a little shy.
We needn’t have worried so much.
When we arrived, the husband took our coats and put them away. His wife and daughter greeted us, and their youngest son welcomed us with a smile.
They made us feel almost like guests of honour.
I had been inside their home many times before, usually during the afternoon. But that evening felt different. The warm lighting, the heating, the preparations for dinner, and the presence of their children gave the house a different atmosphere.
We were no longer simply visiting an older couple we had befriended at church.
We had been invited into a family occasion.
And for the first time since coming to Canada, I was about to experience Thanksgiving in a way that felt wonderfully personal.
A Thanksgiving dinner with a little bit of the Philippines
Before we sat down for dinner, we spent some time talking while our hosts finished preparing the food.
Their children had already helped with the turkey earlier in the day. Their mother, apparently satisfied that they had done their part, had told them that she would take care of the rest of the preparations herself.
I found that rather endearing.
There was something familiar about a mother taking charge of the kitchen, even with grown children around. I thought about how family gatherings in the Philippines often unfolded, with people helping prepare food, talking while waiting for dinner, and someone eventually deciding that enough people had been in the kitchen.
The husband offered us white wine, and we continued our conversations.
At some point, we were called to the dining table. We said grace before the meal and began eating.
There was the roasted turkey I had been looking forward to, along with goulash, red cabbage, and mashed potatoes and yams. It was my first time trying these dishes prepared in this particular way, and I found myself enjoying an experience that I had previously known mostly through television, photographs, and stories.
I was finally having a Canadian Thanksgiving dinner.
Of course, this wasn’t necessarily the Thanksgiving dinner that every Canadian family would recognize. Our hosts were Dutch Canadians, and their meal naturally reflected their own family traditions.
I liked that.
I had come expecting something that resembled an American Thanksgiving scene, complete with turkey and the familiar dishes associated with the holiday. Instead, I found myself enjoying a meal that belonged to this particular family, shaped by their history and the food they loved.
And among everything they had prepared were the ube cake and lumpiang shanghai that my wife had brought.
I suppose there was something fitting about that combination.
We had come from the Philippines, carrying food that reminded us of home. Our hosts had spent years living in our country, and they had invited us to share a holiday that had long been part of their lives.
It wasn’t a carefully planned cultural exchange. At least, I never thought of it that way.
We were simply friends having dinner together.
Perhaps that was why it felt so natural.
Remembering a country from childhood
One of the things I had been looking forward to was meeting their daughter.
She lived in another Canadian province and had come to Edmonton for Thanksgiving. Unlike her younger brother, she had actually spent part of her childhood in the Philippines while her parents were doing missionary work there.
I was curious about what she remembered.
Four years can be a considerable part of someone’s childhood, especially when those years are spent in a country very different from the one where the family eventually settles.
What surprised and pleased me was how fondly she spoke about her time in the Philippines.
She remembered everyday life, the people, and the things that had stayed with her long after her family returned to Canada.
She talked about how local people used to admire her skin colour, something she hadn’t particularly enjoyed as a child. I found that interesting, partly because it reminded me of how Filipinos could be fascinated by people who looked different from them.
What others regarded with admiration could feel uncomfortable to the person receiving all that attention.
I appreciated that she could look back on those experiences with affection without pretending that everything had been enjoyable at the time.
She also remembered the fresh fish.
Of all the things someone could remember about living in the Philippines, I found that detail especially delightful. Food has a way of remaining in our memories, even when many other things have become difficult to recall.
She also described the Banaue Rice Terraces, a place that my wife and I have yet to visit ourselves.
I found it quite amusing that someone who had spent only a few childhood years in the Philippines could tell us about a place in our own country that we had never seen.
Of course, being Filipino doesn’t mean that we have visited every beautiful place in the Philippines. I knew that.
Still, it was an interesting reminder that our experiences of a country are never quite the same, even when one of us considers it home.
There I was, listening to a Canadian woman remember a part of the Philippines from her childhood. Meanwhile, I was discovering Canada through experiences that had been ordinary to her family for years.
We had both lived in countries that the other could speak about with a certain familiarity.
I don’t think I had expected that kind of connection when we first met her parents at church.
But listening to her memories made me happy.
Sometimes, when people speak about the Philippines from the outside, I find myself wondering what version of our country they have come to know. There are so many ways to describe it, and not all of them resemble the country that ordinary Filipinos experience.
With her, I didn’t feel that uneasiness.
She wasn’t trying to explain the Philippines to us. She was simply remembering a place where she had once lived, where she had been a child, and where some of her earliest experiences had taken place.
I found something comforting in that.
The country we had left was also a country that someone else remembered with love.
The son who never went to the Philippines
Their son had a rather different connection to our country.
He was born after the family’s missionary work had ended, so unlike his older sister, he never had the opportunity to live in the Philippines.
His family recalled how, when he was younger, he would complain about being the one who never got to go.
I thought that was funny, although I could understand where he was coming from.
Imagine growing up hearing your parents and older sister talk about four years spent in another country. They had memories of people, places, and experiences that happened before you were born.
Naturally, you would want to know what you had missed.
Yet, as we talked, it became clear that the Philippines had still been part of his childhood in other ways.
He remembered his mother cooking chicken adobo almost every week when they were growing up. The family had also developed a love for rice, something we Filipinos could certainly appreciate.
What amused me even more was how much he knew about Filipino food.
Even his own family seemed surprised by some of the things he knew.
I hadn’t met him before that evening, and I was delighted by how naturally the conversation turned to these familiar subjects.
Here was someone who had never lived in the Philippines, yet who had grown up eating some of its food and hearing stories about it from his family.
It made me think about how the places we’ve lived can continue to influence our families long after we’ve left them.
For his parents and sister, the Philippines was somewhere they had actually been.
For him, it was a place he knew through family stories, through meals prepared at home, and through the experiences his parents had carried back with them.
I suppose that is one of the ways a place becomes part of a family.
It isn’t always about where someone was born or how long they lived somewhere. Sometimes it is about what people continue to remember, share, and practise in their everyday lives.
In their family, the Philippines had not simply disappeared after they returned to Canada.
It had remained, even in the ordinary matter of what they ate for dinner.
Stories from Negros Occidental
As the evening continued, we also found ourselves revisiting stories about the couple’s years in Negros Occidental.
We had heard some of them before, but I enjoyed listening again.
I think what interested me most was that their memories were not limited to the work they had gone there to accomplish. They remembered the people they met, the relationships they formed, and the ordinary circumstances of living in a Filipino community.
The wife often spoke about the local girls whom they had supported during their stay.
Apparently, these girls initially believed they had been hired to work as household helpers. Yet the wife didn’t want them doing work around the house. She continued paying them while refusing to treat them as domestic workers.
I found myself thinking about that arrangement.
I cannot pretend to know everything about the circumstances of those girls or what the support eventually meant for their lives. But I appreciated hearing that their relationship with the family had been about something other than simply hiring people to serve them.
The couple also remembered how children and other people in the community would gather in their air-conditioned room.
I could almost understand why.
Having grown up in the Philippines, I knew how appealing an air-conditioned room could be, particularly during the hotter months. I smiled at the thought of people gathering there, enjoying a little relief from the heat.
There were also stories about the wife’s fondness for driving around the area and about their Filipino language lessons, which had apparently included learning to dance the tinikling.
That detail made me laugh.
Tinikling was something I associated with school presentations and Filipino cultural performances. I had never really imagined a Canadian missionary couple learning it as part of their introduction to life in the Philippines.
Yet it was one more reminder that their time there had involved learning, adapting, and finding their way through a culture that was initially unfamiliar.
I also found myself thinking about the husband’s agricultural work.
He had been involved in helping communities develop practical ways of raising chickens, keeping hogs, and growing crops. These were not particularly glamorous things to talk about, but I appreciated them for that very reason.
For many families in the provinces, livelihoods depended on precisely these kinds of activities.
It was easy to imagine why such work might matter.
I didn’t know all the outcomes of their efforts, and I wouldn’t want to exaggerate what they had accomplished. But what struck me was the affection with which they continued to remember the people and places connected to those years.
They had spent four years in the Philippines, yet those years had remained part of their family conversations for decades afterward.
Now they were sharing those memories with two Filipinos they had met almost by accident at church in Edmonton.
Life can be rather surprising that way.
What I noticed about their family
Somewhere in the middle of the evening, I began noticing something else.
It wasn’t about the food or the stories from the Philippines.
It was the way they treated one another.
The parents and their children clearly loved and respected each other. It showed in the way they spoke, the way they shared memories, and the ease with which they spent time together.
Their daughter lived in another province, so they weren’t always physically together. The children had grown up and were leading their own lives.
Yet that distance didn’t seem to diminish the affection among them.
I found the experience rather sobering.
Of course, a single Thanksgiving dinner cannot tell me everything about a family, much less about an entire culture.
I knew I was seeing one family, on one evening, during a holiday that brought them together.
Still, what I saw challenged some of my assumptions.
Here was a Dutch-Canadian family whose children were adults, whose lives did not always take place under the same roof, and whose affection for one another was unmistakable.
They didn’t need to live together to remain close.
Nor did they need to express their love in exactly the ways that I had grown accustomed to seeing in Filipino families.
Their relationship was simply their own.
Perhaps I had become too comfortable with the idea that certain expressions of love, hospitality, and family closeness were uniquely Filipino.
That evening reminded me that goodness isn’t confined to the people who share our language, our traditions, or our upbringing.
And as I sat there with my wife, sharing a meal with this family, I became increasingly aware of how much we had been welcomed into their lives.
We weren’t relatives.
We weren’t Dutch.
We hadn’t grown up celebrating Thanksgiving the way they had.
Yet none of those differences seemed to matter that evening.
They had made room for us at their table, included us in their conversations, and treated us with an affection that we had gradually come to recognize as something much closer to family.
I had arrived looking forward to my first roasted turkey.
By then, the turkey had become only one small part of what I would remember about the evening.
After dinner, there was still time for family
The evening didn’t end when we finished eating.
After dinner, the husband made coffee, and we finally had the ube cake that my wife had prepared. We continued talking, moving between stories about the Philippines, their family, and whatever else came to mind.
There was no particular urgency to end the gathering.
I liked that.
Sometimes, when you’re visiting someone’s home, you become conscious of the time. You wonder whether you’ve stayed too long, whether your hosts are getting tired, or whether it’s already polite to excuse yourself.
I don’t remember feeling that kind of pressure that evening.
We were comfortable enough to remain at the table, enjoying our coffee and the conversations that followed. There was something reassuring about the absence of formality, especially considering how nervous my wife and I had been before arriving.
We had worried about keeping up with conversations in English. We had wondered how the evening would unfold, particularly since we were meeting their children for the first time.
Yet, by the time we had finished dinner, those worries had become much less important.
We had shared stories, laughed about familiar things, and discovered connections that neither side might have expected.
And the evening was not quite finished.
At some point, we read the Bible together and spent time with a devotional.
I found that particularly meaningful.
Thanksgiving had already given us an opportunity to appreciate the food, the company, and the generosity of our hosts. But spending time with Scripture brought another dimension to the evening.
It reminded me that gratitude, at least in the Christian tradition I grew up with, was never meant to be confined to a particular holiday.
We were supposed to practise it throughout our lives, even when our circumstances were difficult.
Of course, that’s much easier to say than to do.
I have had moments when gratitude came naturally, when there was so much to be happy about that giving thanks required little effort. But there have also been times when I struggled to find anything worth celebrating.
Living in another country has given me both kinds of experiences.
There is excitement in beginning a new life, but there is also uncertainty. There are opportunities to build something different for yourself, but those opportunities often come with the difficult work of adjusting, learning, and accepting that many things are no longer as familiar as they once were.
I don’t think we always talk enough about how tiring that can become.
Sometimes, what you miss isn’t necessarily a particular place or possession.
You miss being familiar to other people.
You miss the comfort of not having to explain yourself, of being understood without needing to introduce your background, your language, or the circumstances that brought you somewhere.
And perhaps that was part of why this Thanksgiving meant so much to me.
For one evening, I didn’t feel that I had to work particularly hard to belong.
We were simply there, sitting with people who were happy to have us.
There was something deeply comforting about that.
Missing one family while finding another
I remember feeling a certain nostalgia during the evening, which was strange because I had never experienced a proper Canadian Thanksgiving dinner before.
How could I feel nostalgic for something I had never known?
I suppose the feeling wasn’t really about Thanksgiving itself.
It was about the familiarity of being gathered around a table with people who loved one another. The conversations that continued long after everyone had finished eating. The way people could move between serious subjects and amusing memories without thinking too much about it.
There was something familiar about the affection in that room.
It reminded me of family gatherings back in the Philippines, even though the food was different and the people around me had grown up with traditions unlike my own.
I thought about how we Filipinos celebrate Christmas.
For many of us, Noche Buena is perhaps the closest equivalent to what Thanksgiving means to Canadian families. We gather, prepare more food than we probably need, and spend time with relatives we might not have seen for a while.
Sometimes the meal itself becomes secondary to the conversations, the teasing, and the simple pleasure of being together.
I don’t mean to suggest that the two celebrations are interchangeable. They come from different histories and have their own meanings.
But the importance we place on gathering with people we love is something I could recognize.
And as happy as I was to be sitting with this family, I also felt a little sad.
I thought about my own family and how I wished I could experience something similar with them.
Distance changes the way we participate in family life. You can call, send photographs, and remain connected through the convenience of technology. You can celebrate the same occasions, even when you’re living in different countries.
But it isn’t quite the same as sitting together.
You cannot always share a meal, help prepare the food, or spend an ordinary evening doing nothing particularly important.
Those little moments become things you miss.
I don’t think my happiness that evening made that sadness disappear. If anything, being welcomed into such a loving home reminded me of how much I valued the family relationships I had left behind.
And perhaps that’s one of the complicated things about building a life somewhere else.
You can be grateful for the people you’ve met without becoming any less attached to the people you miss.
You can begin to feel at home in Canada and still wish you were somewhere else, even if only for an evening.
Those feelings don’t have to contradict one another.
I was happy. I was grateful. I missed my family.
All of those things were true.
What made the evening special was that I didn’t have to choose between them.
The kindness of our hosts didn’t replace the family we had in the Philippines. Nor did it have to.
It simply gave us another place where we felt loved.
Hospitality is not something one culture owns
There was another thought I carried home from that Thanksgiving dinner.
Growing up, I often heard Filipinos describe ourselves as among the most hospitable people in the world.
It’s something we take pride in, and understandably so. Many of us grew up in households where visitors were offered food almost immediately, where unexpected guests could find themselves sitting at the dining table, and where people made room for others even when there wasn’t much to spare.
I’ve experienced that generosity myself.
But the older I get, and the more people I meet outside the Philippines, the more I question the need to claim hospitality as something particularly ours.
Why do we sometimes feel the need to compare our kindness with that of other cultures?
I don’t think kindness becomes more meaningful simply because we believe our people are better at practising it.
And I don’t think being Filipino automatically makes someone hospitable, any more than being Canadian automatically makes someone distant or reserved.
People are different.
Some are generous. Some are indifferent. Others can be unkind, regardless of where they come from.
Living in Canada has made that distinction more apparent to me.
I have read news about white supremacist movements and heard public conversations in which immigrants are blamed for problems that are far more complicated than the presence of newcomers.
There are times when such conversations make you conscious of being different, even when you are simply trying to live your life like everyone else.
I don’t want to make this reflection about those experiences. They deserve their own consideration.
But I cannot completely separate them from the gratitude I felt that evening.
Because here was a family whose background was different from ours, whose lives had taken them through experiences we had never known, and who nevertheless welcomed us with such sincerity.
They didn’t have to invite us.
They could have remained friendly acquaintances from church, people we greeted on Sundays before going our separate ways.
They could have kept Thanksgiving as a private celebration with their children.
Instead, they invited us into their home and made us part of their family gathering.
And that kindness was not limited to one evening.
It had begun with an unexpected conversation after church, continued through lunches and Sunday rides, and gradually developed into a friendship that my wife and I had come to treasure.
I think that’s what I want to remember when I hear people make sweeping statements about cultures and nationalities.
Human goodness is not exclusive to any country.
The ability to welcome a stranger, to care about another person’s well-being, or to treat someone like family cannot be measured simply by the language they speak or the traditions they practise.
What matters, ultimately, is how we treat the people who come into our lives.
And sometimes, the people who make you feel most welcome are those you never expected to become part of your family.
A different understanding of gratitude
My experience of Thanksgiving began in the Philippines, in a Protestant church where we gave an offering of one peso for every year of our lives.
I still find that tradition meaningful.
There was something simple about counting the years you had been given and offering something in gratitude for each one.
As a child, I probably understood it differently from how I understand it now.
Back then, Thanksgiving was another occasion in the church calendar, something we observed as part of our religious life.
As I grew older, I began to understand that gratitude was not always about having more things to celebrate.
Sometimes, it was about recognizing what had quietly sustained us through the years.
I thought about that during our Thanksgiving evening in Edmonton.
Our hosts had spent four years in the Philippines, long before my wife and I came to Canada. Their work had taken them to Negros Occidental, where they learned about Filipino life, built relationships with local people, and raised their daughter during part of her childhood.
Their son, born after they returned to Canada, had grown up hearing stories about those years and eating the Filipino dishes his mother continued to prepare.
Years later, my wife and I found ourselves standing in a church line in Edmonton, waiting to greet the pastor.
An older woman approached us, thinking we were people she had met before.
She was mistaken.
Yet that small misunderstanding became the beginning of something we could not have anticipated.
We discovered that we came from places connected by a shared history, and a conversation in Tagalog and Hiligaynon eventually led to a lunch invitation.
That first lunch led to more conversations, more gatherings, and a friendship that grew without much ceremony.
And now we were celebrating Thanksgiving with their family.
I find myself returning to that sequence of events, not because I believe every encounter needs to carry some extraordinary meaning, but because it reminds me how much of our lives is shaped by ordinary decisions.
Someone chooses to approach you.
Someone invites you for lunch.
Someone offers to bring you to church.
Someone remembers you when their family is gathering for a holiday.
None of those gestures seems particularly remarkable on its own.
Yet taken together, they can change how a person experiences an unfamiliar place.
I suppose that’s part of what faith means to me now, too.
Not only the beliefs we profess or the traditions we continue to practise, but the ways those beliefs find expression in how we care for other people.
I’ve seen enough of life to know that religious communities, like families, are not always perfect. Being part of a church doesn’t automatically make us kind, generous, or understanding.
I would hesitate to make that claim.
But when I think about the friendship my wife and I have developed with this couple, I am reminded of the kind of Christian fellowship I still hope to find and practise.
One where care does not end with a greeting after Sunday worship.
One where people make space for others in their ordinary lives.
And one where love can be expressed through something as simple as sharing a meal.
That evening, I was grateful not only for the food or for finally experiencing Thanksgiving the way I had imagined it.
I was grateful for the people who had made us feel that we belonged.
The kindness we carry home
Eventually, it was time for us to leave.
The husband offered to drive us home, just as he had picked us up earlier.
Once again, we tried to decline.
We didn’t want to inconvenience him, especially after everything the family had already done for us that evening.
But their daughter insisted that we should let her father bring us home.
So we accepted.
I smiled at that, thinking about how familiar the exchange had become. We would try to avoid troubling them, and they would insist on helping us anyway.
I don’t know whether we’ll ever become entirely comfortable accepting that kind of generosity.
Perhaps part of us will always worry about asking too much from people who have already given us so much.
But I am learning that sometimes, accepting kindness is also a way of allowing others to express their care.
Not every generous gesture needs to be repaid immediately.
And not every invitation comes with an expectation that you will somehow prove yourself worthy of it.
Sometimes, people simply want you to be there.
When I think back on our first Canadian Thanksgiving dinner, I remember the roasted turkey, the goulash, the red cabbage, and all the food we enjoyed.
I remember their daughter’s stories about growing up in the Philippines, their son’s familiarity with Filipino cooking, and the couple’s recollections of their years in Negros Occidental.
I remember the wine, the coffee, and the ube cake that my wife had prepared.
I remember reading the Bible together after dinner.
But more than any of those things, I remember how we felt.
We had entered their home a little nervous, conscious that we were joining a celebration with a family whose traditions weren’t entirely our own.
We left feeling welcomed, cared for, and included.
There was no need for us to pretend that we shared the same upbringing or cultural background. Our differences remained, but they did not prevent us from becoming close.
And perhaps that was the most meaningful thing about the experience.
They didn’t make us feel that we were different people being accommodated at their celebration.
They made us feel like family.
I don’t know whether they fully realize how much that means to my wife and me.
Maybe, to them, it was simply another Thanksgiving. Their children had come together, they had prepared a meal, and they had invited two friends from church to join them.
I hope they know that, for us, it became a memory we will carry for a long time.
As I continue making a life in Canada, I know there will be more difficult days, more adjustments to make, and more encounters that might leave me questioning where I belong.
I also know that I cannot expect everyone I meet to show the same kindness.
But I want to remember this evening when those days come.
I want to remember that kindness still exists, even when the news and the conversations around us can make it difficult to see.
That good people can be found in places we never expected.
And that sometimes, in a country where you are still learning how to belong, someone will open their door and make room for you at their table.
If I could tell our hosts one thing, it would simply be this.
Thank you for making us feel welcome.
Thank you for making us feel special, loved, and not different.
Thank you for reminding us that family can extend beyond the people who share our blood, our language, or the country where we were born.
And thank you for giving us another reason to be grateful for the life we are slowly building here.
My first Canadian Thanksgiving wasn’t really about the turkey, although I was certainly happy to have finally tried it.
It was about an ordinary evening spent with people who had become extraordinarily dear to us.
I went there expecting to experience a Canadian tradition.
I came home grateful that, in a country still becoming familiar to me, my wife and I had found another family.
