Here’s something else we, as Americans, rarely think about:

Nobody celebrates Thanksgiving except us.

And if you happen to be out of the country when Thanksgiving rolls around … good luck finding a turkey. Cooked, uncooked, still in its feathers.  Non-Americans just don’t know Thanksgiving. “What? American colonists and Indians and … what?”

But it’s a big holiday, to Yanks. The favorite holiday of more than a few, because it involves eating and football but no gifts, and most everybody has four days off these days and what’s not to like?

Which is long preamble to … how we patched together something that vaguely resembled Thanksgiving … in Hong Kong.

The flip side of Thanksgiving … is how pitiful it is when you don’t observe it. It’s worse than being alone on Christmas, because in the States there’s this whole system built up for People Who Don’t Do Christmas. Movie showings, etc. But Thanksgiving? That’s not a religious holiday. Even the secular humanists (does anybody use that expression anymore?) are on-board with this.

So, when you’re an American sitting around on Thanksgiving doing nothing Thanksgiving-like … that’s a bit sad.

We decided we were not going to suffer that melancholy fate.

So, we started looking for a place that would serve something resembling a Thanksgiving meal. (No way we were going to make one, because we don’t have the right equipment, and the kitchen is sad, and since when do two people eat a turkey whole?)

There aren’t really many “American” restaurants here, unless you count McDonald’s (and in that case, there are about 500 “American” restos in HK). So we searched for Thanksgiving meals. Something called “Fat Angelo’s” came up, but the online reviews were not kind. Something called “California Kitchen” (no “Pizza” in the middle) … and then we had the bright idea of checking the Foreign Correspondents’ Club … and voila! … my favorite hangout on the island was doing Thanksgiving.

Now, mind, the FCC really is veddy British. It has some American moments, but it’s essentially a colonial institution that didn’t pack up and leave at “the handover” of Hong Kong to China, in 1997.

So, you wonder if a British institution, apparently managed and run by a large crew of fiftysomething Hongkongers can pull this off. But we decided to give it a try.

And it worked out. It wasn’t quite the big bird with all the fixin’s (as every American TV anchor is scripted to announce) … but it did just fine.

Because I had to be at work at 2 p.m., we went for the turkey lunch.

Cream of pumpkin soup up front. That was nice. Gotta have pumpkin somewhere in the Thanksgiving meal. Though we would have preferred it in a pie later, but anyway … A basket of bread with butter. We could have ordered booze, but Leah said “We both have to go to work after this,” which must have made the waiter laugh, considering this is the Foreign Correspondents’ Club and when, exactly, did journalists start worrying about being a little tipsy in the early afternoon?

Let me interject here that the FCC has one of the nice British aspects in that it has serious cutlery and dishes. Silver plate, I think, and some nice dinnerware, and a crew of professionally polite waiters. And the upstairs dining room is very nice. Old and woody, like an English club ought to be. So the atmosphere is nice. Yeah.

Then they brought out the main meal. We may put up a mugshot of the plate here, but in case we don’t, it was a variety of vegetables around the edges. Sweet potato slices over here, then sliced carrots in butter, Brussel sprouts and buttered kohlrabi — which is a tasteless starchy veggie I hadn’t seen before. In the middle of the plate was a stack of turkey, with the white meat on top, quite a bit of brown meat underneath, and a sort of hash-brown patty of  stuffing at the bottom. With some cranberry sauce poured over the kohlrabi, and not quite enough brown gravy over the turkey.

But, for sure, it was quite Thanksgiving-like.

We were surrounded by non-Americans, and I almost felt bad for them because they had to be wondering what was up with turkey for lunch, when a lot of them don’t even eat turkey. There was an option for ham.

For dessert, we had a big wedge of cheese cake, which they didn’t quite pull off, but that was OK, because we also had a couple of teensy mince pies. Bite-sized.

Anyway, it worked out well. We had turkey on Thanksgiving, and we were in a nice venue, and it was done on nice linens with real silver-plate. There was no football, of course, and no family. and around the bar downstairs everybody was talking about the terrorists in Mumbai.

But it was nice. It was good. And far from feeling pitiful as Thanksgiving rolled around, we felt a part of it — albeit on the wrong side of the Pacific.