Show Off Your Spanish Skills This Thanksgiving

This post is for our American friends learning Spanish. Thanksgiving is just around the corner and we just can’t wait for the big turkey dinner with friends and family. Now, although the occasion isn’t exactly observed by the Spanish-speaking world, a fiesta is a fiesta. Let’s face it, Thanksgiving is all about food and so are the Latinos! So, now would be as awesome a time as any to brag about your Spanish before an audience of clueless folks. The millions of Spanish-speakers who call America home enjoy the day as much as you do if not more. And why not! A day off is a day off, after all. And the turkey dinner. So let’s dive in and get it over with.

The day is known as Thanksgiving to everyone regardless of what language they speak. However, if your pedantic self insists on a purer Spanish translation, it would be La Dia de las Gracias, but don’t blame me if that makes you sound like a phrasebook linguist. And if you insist on sounding even more like a dictionary-monster, try Día de Acción de Gracias. Quite a mouthful, isn’t it?

Two aspects define Thanksgiving – family and food. These also happen to be the two defining features of the Hispanic way of life, both in Spain as well as in Latin America. This is the reason, at least in America, the festival resonates pretty well with the Latino community. This makes Spanish quite a fun language to use with your Latino folks should you have any over for dinner on the big night. That they’ll leave impressed is a given.

Winner, winner, turkey dinner

Nothing says Thanksgiving louder than a sinfully big dinner
Photo credit: Klimt licensed CC BY 2.0

What would Thanksgiving be without the quintessential turkey! Of course, one might argue that the day is about way more than a bird and reducing it to mindless binging and drinking undermines its historical and cultural significance, but we’ll still go with turkey. If you plan on bowling over your Spanish-speaking guests at the dinner table, make sure you know what the bird is called in Spanish. The word you need is pavo. Pavo also happens to be the word for peacock although a more accurate translation for the latter one would be pavo real (literally, “royal turkey”). How to remember the word? Just remember a Mexican friend named Pablo who feasts on roast turkey like there’s no tomorrow. The rhyme between Pablo and pavo will help you never forget the word.

Although pavo is standard and the only one understood in Spain, it’s not universal. If your friends are from Central America or (especially) Mexico, you could go the extra mile and learn the word from their flavor of Spanish – guajolote. This tongue-twister comes from the Nahuatl word for the bird in question and is preferred to pavo in Mexico, El Salvador, and Honduras. Since guajolote doesn’t descend from Latin like most Spanish words do, it sounds strange to our English ears and is rather hard to memorize. But memorize it you will. Just think out of the box and build some mental bridges. Remember Pablo who finished up all your dinner and left none for you and your guests? That selfish glutton, he must be punished! So you report him to the cops and guess what, they cart him off to Guantanamo! A tad harsh for eating a mere dinner but it’s alright, still way milder than crucifixion. At Guantanamo, an obese Pablo turns super-skinny and his chubby cheeks turn hollow because all he ever gets to have is green tea! Poor Pablo. So, your mental cue is Pablo in the dreaded Guantanamo Bay with hollow cheeks because he only gets to have tea and no food. Guantanamo. Hollow. Tea. All for stealing a stuffed guajolote.

If your friend is from Southern Guatemala, you might also want to go with chompipe, the word preferred also in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and parts of El Salvador. A shorter version, chumpe, also enjoys currency in Southern Mexico and parts of El Salvador and Guatemala. Chump (a word familiar to English ears) rhymes with chumpe and should come in handy because it happens to be a slang term for a gullible idiot, as does turkey.

Thanksgiving is also called Turkey Day for a reason.
Photo credit: Steve Voght licensed CC BY-SA 2.0

If you’re comfortable with guajolote, you should also become equally at home with a much shorter guanajo, the word Cubans use. In Cuban street Spanish, guanajo also refers to a moron which should only sound normal given how turkey enjoys a similar usage in colloquial English.

Mexicans are crazy. They use so many different words for every single thing! Why can’t they just stick to guajolote? Well, that’s how Spanish rolls and you’d be better off embracing it than complaining. That’s because in certain parts of the country, they call the bird cócono. This sounds like coconut which makes it easier to remember. Your friend Pablo has been a good boy ever since he landed in Guantanamo and pleased with his behavior, the warden has decided to let him have coconut cookies along with the otherwise non-nutritional green tea.

Now before you go crazy and start hating on turkey even before Thanksgiving, we’ll just address one last word and then move on. The word is pisco. This is turkey in Colombia and Venezuela. In order to memorize this, just remember how pissed you were when you learned that Pablo had left no turkey for you at the dinner. You see, all languages are crazy in that they have more than one word for most things. But Spanish takes this to a whole new level. One might argue, if there can be there can be a ridiculous number of words for boy, why not for turkey as well!

Enough turkey already!

Well, this is to ensure we don’t obsess over the bird forever. Thanksgiving is more than just turkey and so is this post. But just before we get over it, there’s one small yet significant thing you’d do well to learn. It’s relleno. Relleno is an adjective and means stuffed. That’s what you do with turkey on Thanksgiving so you can see why the word is important. In order to keep it safe in your memory, imagine yourself at your mom’s for the big dinner. Imagine your mom doing what moms do best, i.e. trying to feed you until you drop dead. But now you’re so full, you just can’t take it anymore. So when she offers you the zillionth helping of that otherwise droolworthy stuffed turkey, you go, “No mom, really no!” No more relleno, really no. Speaking of relleno, the word is also often used as a noun and when it is, it translates into everything from the stuffing itself to turkey dressing.

Pumpkins are as integral to Thanksgiving as they are to Halloween!
Photo credit: Patrick Briggs licensed CC BY 2.0

Pumpkin pie is another Thanksgiving staple and we have that covered here. Pumpkin is calabaza which is also the generic word for all members of the squash family. And pie is tarta or pastel. So your yummy pumpkin pie becomes pastel de calabaza (or tarta de calabaza) in Spanish. tarta comes from tart and should be a cakewalk to remember. Pastel shouldn’t be a problem either since it’s related to pastry. As for calabaza, imagine a politically incorrect jack-o’-lantern colorfully painted to look like your boss at work. Agreed this is Thanksgiving and not Halloween but who cares as long as nobody’s getting fired. Calabaza works just fine in most parts of the Spanish-speaking world including Spain, Mexico, Argentina, and the Caribbean. But many parts of South America prefer zapallo. In Venezuela and Colombia, you’ll also hear auyama.

Yam also features heavily in Thanksgiving dinners throughout America. Again, there are several words for this item in Spanish, but you just can’t go wrong with batata which already sounds like and potato making it a cinch to remember. Other words are boniata, ñame(not name!), and camote. Ñame, if you are familiar with the sound of ñ in Spanish, should be easy to memorize as it rhymes with yam to a good extent.

Once you’re through with the big dinner, you wash it all down with a glass of cranberry juice like a true American. Cranberry, along with blueberry and bilberry, is arándano in Spanish. The juice is zumo or jugo depending on which side of the Atlantic you happen to be during Thanksgiving. Think of being in a situation where there’s no cranberries left in the world. You traveled around the world looking for it and yet no arándano for your juice!

Of course, you’re not Pablo and are not going to finish off everything at the table, are you? I mean, you have a capacity and Thanksgiving is all about having more on the table than that capacity of yours. So what happens next? There’s going to be leftover food. That would be sobras or restos in Spanish. Both words are used in plurals which is understandable since we always say leftovers and not leftover. Restos sounds like rest, which is one word for whatever’s left, so should be easy to relate. As for sobras, it’s related to super in English. And super features in superficial. Reminds you of leftover food, doesn’t it?

Of course, that’s far from all you’ll need if you plan on truly showing off your Spanish at the dinner table on Thanksgiving. But as long as they’re all drunk and fed to the brim, who’s going to notice anyway? So go ahead, enjoy your few minutes of glory and have fun working out your Black Friday shopping list.