11/24/2019 04:00 PM
Come, enjoy this distinctively cross-cultural approach to the American Thanksgiving holiday, written by one of YourGlobalFamily's apprentices.
“Onje ti ready!”
My sister and I shout in our anglicized Yoruba to announce that the long day of cooking the family’s Thanksgiving meal has come to an end. The food is finally ready!
On the table, we see parts of a traditional American holiday feast with a glistening turkey serving as the centerpiece. The Thanksgiving standard sides of savory stuffing and sweet cranberry sauce make an appearance, while glasses of egg nog are at each of our place settings--a special request from yours truly.
However, some traditional sides are noticeably absent.
In lieu of mac and cheese, we have a bowl of vibrantly orange Nigerian jollof rice. A dish of roasted root vegetables is replaced by a plate of fried plantain and instead up a heaping pyramid of cornbread squares or dinner rolls, a dish with mounds of moin-moin (a steamed bean cake made with tomato and pepper stew base) is squeezed in between the cranberry sauce and turkey.
We enjoyed watching the marching bands on TV at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade during breakfast, and now it is time to express gratitude as a family while the sounds of legendary Yoruba musicians King Sunny Ade and Ebenezer Obey fill the entire house during our evening meal.
How Thanksgiving looks different from the "traditional" celebration for me
This was my Thanksgiving holiday experience every year as a first-generation Nigerian-American child growing up in Rhode Island, and then as a teenager in Georgia. My parents’ efforts of cultural assimilation intertwined with their continuous preservation of Nigerian culture developed the framework for me to appreciate, explore, and develop my cultural identity.
I am equally a Northeastern and Southeastern American, a third-culture Nigerian-American hybrid, and a dual citizen of both nations. I took Irish dance classes as a kid and performed contemporary Congolese dance at a Lincoln Center summer event in my late 20s. I grew up drinking coffee milk in my New England elementary school, sweet tea in my southern high school, gourmet loose-leaf teas as a career woman in New York City, and Chapmans as a wife and mother in Lagos, Nigeria.
The complexity of my cultural uniqueness is one of the special things I knew I wanted to carry with me throughout all the stages of my life. It is the foundation of who I am and how I interact with the world. So as I mapped out a plan for my career as a working mother, it was essential for me to design a life for my family that allowed us to engage with many people from all over the world.
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My academic and professional career track
My academic and early professional career was in neuroscience research, but when I decided to move to Nigeria, I also decided to make a major career pivot to pursue a remote work career as I knew I’d be back and forth between continents. During my time in NYC, I wrote for several online publications and my own personal blogs and I became interested in exploring more of the ever-expanding online space.
Digital marketing seemed like a field that would allow me to achieve my three main career goals: location-independence, the ability to engage with people in a variety of fields, and an opportunity for creativity. When I saw an Instagram ad for GenM, a program that matches digital marketing apprentices with small business owners, I signed up immediately.
After filling out my profile and beginning the training modules, I matched with several business owners, but the message I received from Caroline about YourGlobalFamily stood out. I was immediately drawn to YGF’s mission of interculturalism for parents of young children through education, community, and adventure. As I am the target consumer for YGF, I felt it would be a great partnership if my first apprenticeship was with this business.
During my time working with Caroline, I gained a lot of experience in market research and when she noticed that I leaned in towards Instagram, I was encouraged to do more in-depth study and work in using Instagram as a marketing tool.
My three months as a YGF apprentice gave me the experience I needed to be confident in my decision to pursue digital marketing. I am thankful for the opportunity to start this journey with a business whose core values are in line with my personal values and family life goals.
YourGlobalFamily, by way of the GenM apprenticeship program, helped to jump-start my location-independent digital marketing career. With the opportunity to worldschool my son and immerse my family in many cultures, I hope to add a few more international dishes to our family’s traditional, multicultural, and ever-evolving Thanksgiving Day menu.
If you celebrate Thanksgiving, do you have any culture or family-specific traditions as Erica does?