Do you know what I had for dinner on Thanksgiving Day this year?  Toast.  Okay, it was whole wheat and had butter on it, but still . . . 
    
The reasons for this involved a business trip to some corporate outpost in Wales and the fact that Thanksgiving isn't a widely recognized holiday here in Britain.  I wasn't even aware that it was Thanksgiving until after my sumptuous buttered toast feast, when I went to check my e-mail and found a single Thanksgiving greeting from a friend back in the States.  My guess is, most people were too busy watching football, chatting with second cousins or otherwise sated into lethargy with turkey and pumpkin pie to bother checking their e-mail.  Which is, of course, as it should be. 
     
As for me, after realizing I had just missed one of my most favorite holidays, I went to bed. 
    
The next night, however, my wife and I went out to dinner.  This was, in reality, my Thanksgiving substitute dinner--which had been booked some weeks earlier--at Amberley Castle.  It's not every day you get to have dinner in a 900-year-old Norman castle and the experience was as unique as it was opulent. 
    
Upon driving up to the entrance via the private road, the outer gates automatically swing open, allowing you into the courtyard where the car park is.  You walk through arched gates to reach the inner courtyard and then though a formidable set of doors to access the reception hall of the dinning area.  Inside, the rooms are tastefully decorated with tapestries thick velvet curtains and the bric-a-brac of medieval England.  Jousting lances, shields and broadswords adorn the high stonewalls and one has the sense that they are not reproductions. 
     
We were shown into the library, a warm and cozy room of dark wood, upholstered furniture and a fire.  The wine list was as thick as War and Peace and featured bottles of champagne for as much as £1,600.  I quickly flipped to the back where I found a suitable South African Chardonnay that didn't require financing, then sat back and enjoyed the canapés. 
     
To describe the ornate process of dinner would take up too much time.  Suffice it to say that in ordering and receiving our pre-dinner drinks, table wine, main course and desert, we rarely saw the same waiter twice.  They all seemed to have some highly specialize niche; there was even one waiter whose job it was to take our drinks from us in the library, put them on a little tray and carry them upstairs to the dining hall where our table awaited us. 
     
No detail was overlooked.  The china was Versace, the tablecloth and napkins were of the finest linen and the silverware was aptly named.  The food was almost too good to be true.  I had the lamb, and it all but melted in my mouth; each bite was an experience in gastronomic ecstasy.  But amid all this splendor and fine food, the single item that impressed me most was the wine glass. 
     
No, really. It was the most delicate and elegant piece of crystal I have ever seen.  The stem was impossibly thin and the bell like a clear sheet of paper.  A glass as fine as this cannot help but magnify the quality of the wine; the thin edge seems to make the wine almost evaporate in a burst of flavor as it rolls over the lip.  I was so pleasantly startled by my first sip I was literally--not figuratively--taken aback. 
     
After desert (a cheese cake and compote to die for) we retired to the library for coffee, petit fours, an after dinner brandy and a fine cigar by the fire.  It was, from start to finish, a relaxing and elegant affair, as far removed from the strident buzz and heavy fare of a traditional family Thanksgiving dinner as, well, as I am from America. 
     
Though I cannot, in all honest, say I would have traded it all, I might have given up some of it (but not the wine glass) for a bit of turkey with cranberry sauce and a slab of pumpkin pie.

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