Now it can be told. We skipped right past any sort of celebration of Thanksgiving Day, in Abu Dhabi, because we were hoping to pull together something in Paris two days later.

Yes, it is possible to buy a turkey in Paris, and to round up most of the ingredients necessary for the infamous “fixin’s” that all American TV anchors are obliged to mention (“Turkey with all the fixin’s.”)

The key item?

The bird, of course.

It isn’t as if you can walk into a store here, or even a butcher’s shop, and find a turkey to buy. The French eat almost anything (snails, frog legs, calf’s head?), but turkey is not generally on their list. Maybe because it’s a New World bird, and not (let’s concede) always particularly tasty.

So, we special-ordered our turkey from a rotisserie chicken store about a 15-minute walk from the place where we will be spending the next two weeks, on the Rue du Tresor. The rotisserie guy cooked the turkey like he would a chicken, with a bit of a glaze on it. And anyone who has had rotisserie chicken in France knows how nice that is.

Pulling together dinner was made a little trickier … because we weren’t able to get into the apartment until 4, and guests were going to arrive at 6:30. We had a turkey on premises, but we had to bash out the rest of it.

Happily, we got major help from our guests. One brought mashed potatoes and three cheeses (Camembert, St Marcelin and a goat), and another came with candied yams (I never knew I liked those!) and green beans.

We also had to transport our Champagne and red wine from where we spent Friday night … through the streets of the Marais and to the new apartment, and I made that trek.  (Not that anyone carrying two cases of wine, of six bottles each, seems out of place, in Paris.)

I made a run to the Franprix market, and bought a six-pack of Evian, and Leah got two baguettes for the cheese course, and she used the canned pumpkin and some pre-packaged french pastry crust to pull together a pie. (Substituting for evaporated milk and not having a pie tin proved only slightly tricky, but all was well in the end.)

Earlier, I had rearranged the furniture in the apartment to turn the second bedroom into a dining room — with three sorts of chairs collected from flea markets, it would seem, a smallish round table and a small rectangular one butted together. For seven, it was tight, but doable.

I previously have gone on record in praise of the French dinner party, which is unhurried, notable for copious amounts of fermented grape juice, lots of good conversation … and it’s all just so massively civilized.

We talked more than a little about the world economy (our forecast: bleak), and the modern mobility of labor, and the latest changes in the Marais, but also about Leah’s trip to India and the perfidy and incompetence of the local telecoms.

It was a very pleasant evening in our quiet end of the street, which is about 50 yards (and a world) away from the young hipsters thronging the cafes and bars of the Rue Vielle de Temple.

Dinner lasted four hours, and the turkey was excellent, the stuffing was interesting (which seemed to be made of ground pork, figs, chestnuts; we were reminded that “stuffings” here are almost always meat based, and not bread-like).

Among our group of seven were two French people, and the younger found the pumpkin pie to be … ghastly, which is not an unusual reaction here. She promptly traded it in for some cheese.

The Americans at the table came from Virginia, Missouri and California, and we compared Thanksgiving histories, and tried to explain what it was all about, to the French duo and one Englishman. They knew the basics of it, but an American Thanksgiving is still an odd concept, if you haven’t grown up with it. And I think Yanks sometimes forget how different Thanksgiving can be from region to region or even from house to house.

(OK, see, everyone gets together, and we prepare too much food, and the main event is a very large bird that we may not eat again, in that form, until next Thanksgiving … and we watch football, American football, that is, except when we’re doing this two days late.)

On Thanksgiving Day+2, we were very thankful for such good friends, and an ability to travel to see some of them, and for having jobs in our chosen field in difficult economic times. We have it pretty good, and we need to acknowledge that.

It was lovely, and I officially no longer expect anyone to feel bad about our non-celebration on the actual holiday, back in the UAE.