Every year at the end of November we drive down to New York State to celebrate American Thanksgiving with great family friends. They have a farm in the country so the trip usually involves some good, healthy outdoor work, a great way to metabolize the Thanksgiving Feast. Just to be clear: we feast and work on different days.

Beautiful Upstate New York

For me, it’s a great opportunity to get my kids out doing real work, you know the kind where you can actually see what’s being done and you have to use your body to actually do the work? Most years, the main job on the farm is loading hay from the barn into a big truck for transport and sale. It typically means a chain of us manhandling 750 – 800 bales of hay, which makes for a pretty good workout, I’ll tell you. This year we also helped cover next year’s garlic crop with straw, to protect it from the elements over the winter.

Hooray! My son can work!

One of the highlights on this trip was the work crew we were with: a local Amish farmer and a large group of hard-working Amish lads (his sons and nephews, who were visiting from Illinois) came by to be neighbourly and help out. He was a cheerful and very pleasant fellow and it was an interesting cultural experience for my son: the younger Amish boys didn’t even speak English!

The friendly Amish farmer and his oldest son loading up hay bales

Amish boys (with my son in the background) moving the hay out from the back of the barn

A few days after Thanksgiving, we were visited by a flock of wild turkeys. Clearly there will be food for the next Thanksgiving because those turkeys were huge! (Don’t worry, no harm was done to any of the turkeys, and – truth to tell – we didn’t even eat turkey this (American) Thanksgiving. We’d already had turkey for our own (Canadian) Thanksgiving.

This photo does not do justice to the actual size of these animals, nonchalantly pecking their way through the backyard.

My youngest son and I concluded the Thanksgiving experience with a trip to a beautifully restored 1924 movie theatre where we watched the latest Harry Potter film and both thoroughly enjoyed it.

The Lafayette was built in 1924 and has been fully restored.