In the fall of 1998, I found myself 6,000 miles from home and facing my first Thanksgiving away from my family ever. I was 17 years old and an exchange student in Denmark, living on a tiny island in the middle of the Baltic Sea. My friend and fellow exchange student, Karyn, invited me to participate with her in preparing a Thanksgiving dinner for her host family.

We eagerly e-mailed home for our most beloved recipes from mom, salivating with excitement to taste something familiar. After a few weeks planning and fine-tuning our menu, I traveled across the tiny Scandinavian countryside to embark on my biggest and most daring culinary event to date. We were young and ambitious and determined to translate the feeling and spirit behind this truly American holiday to our Danish hosts. Boy, were we in for it.

Let's face it. Some things are just lost in translation. In Denmark, eating turkey is about like eating duck here in the states. Some of us do it, but not many and it's not too easy to find duck, wrapped in plastic for 29 cents a pound. Instead, Karyn's host mother had managed to find a farmer who had a turkey, which was beheaded and waiting in all its feathery glory on the back porch.

After rolling up our sleeves and dismantling the turkey, we were broached with our next anomaly of the Danish Thanksgiving: How to fit a 20 pounds turkey into something about the size of a toaster oven and after it was in, how to get it cook all the way through! You see, the European kitchen is much small than that of its American counterpart and the appliances are all to scale in size. In addition, there were some vital utensils missing altogether such as the electric mixer (key to Grandma's light and fluffy potatoes) and the all-mighty microwave. This made re-heating dishes alarmingly difficult, not to mention that in this Danish farmhouse, the formal dining room was on the opposite end of the house from the kitchen.

Needless to say, our meal was lukewarm at best. Add this with ingredients in a foreign language, measuring in deciliters and grams instead of cups and teaspoons and one strict Danish host mother hovering over everything you do.

The whole thing was a recipe for disaster.

Fortunately for us, the Danes enjoy their libations liberally at dinner parties. So when it came time to actually eat the pink turkey and lumpy gravy, the unleavened dinner rolls, dry stuffing and burnt rice pudding, no one really cared what anything tasted like. They seemed to at least be having a good time. We, on the other hand, were exhausted little chefs and wondered if our traditions had really translated through our terrible cooking and our broken attempt at a dinner toast in Danish.

Whether the Danes at our dinner really understood the meaning of Thanksgiving, we will never know. I, on the other hand, will always be thankful for that disastrous Thanksgiving. It gave me one of my best friends in the entire work, Karyn. No matter how far away we are from each other, we will always remember on another on this holiday and be grateful for our time abroad and as friends.

My most disastrous Thanksgiving was a few years ago when while making a huge pumpkin pie, doubling the recipe for the filling, I discovered that I needed more sugar in the canister. I went to the pantry, retrieving a new sack of sugar, filled the canister, but forgot to add the additional amount of sugar to the pumpkin pie filling.

Imagine the looks on the faces of my family when the beautiful pie was sliced, put on dessert plates, topped with real whipping cream, and the first bites were popped into their mouths, to the taste of a tart pumpkin pie!

Every year I take pride in hosting a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner for our family. I absolutely love cooking for Thanksgiving, and enjoy the time we get to spend together to visit and break bread with one another.

Every now and again we are blessed with the presence of my father-in-law and his wife, who live out of state. On one particular year, while the in-laws where here, dinner was well on schedule and everything was looking great. It has been storming pretty good for the past week and with living in the sticks, losing power is not a surprising thing, however, on this particular day that thought had not crossed my mind.

Obviously it is bound to happen one year or another. All of the sudden, poof and the power was out! Oh yeah, one important detail, the 22-pound turkey was still in the oven with another two hours to go. I was dumb-founded, I did not know what to do. A tree was down, the power crew had been called and power was a million miles away. The only option we had was to finish the turkey in the barbecue ‹ what a bunch of hillbillies! Thank goodness we had one big enough. That barbecue saved our day. Fortunately, we were able finish the turkey and serve dinner on time.

We all laugh about it to this day. The only thing that makes this story a little funnier is that the next year while I was cooking Thanksgiving dinner, my oven went out while the turkey was roasting! Thank goodness for our microwave!

Two Thanksgivings ago, I had to work so my children and boyfriend decided they would fix the dinner and invite the whole family.

It was 3 p.m. and ready to cook potatoes and the turkey had an hour left.

All of a sudden our electrical box caught fire. We had no electricity or water, because we were on a well.

The guests started showing up. My boyfriend ran out with a trailer. I wasn't sure what he was doing. When he showed back up, he had a porta potty on the back, in addition to gallons and gallons of water!

He is the king of drama. He was under the assumption that we would be without electrical and water for weeks, so instead of dying of thirst and not going to the restroom he went WAY overboard and thought we would be set for weeks.

While he was going crazy, my father went out and rigged the wires, and we had lights before he even got home.