I celebrated my first ever Thanksgiving Day in Afghanistan on Thursday.
It was all a bit surreal, tucking into the traditional American Thanksgiving fare of turkey, bread stuffing, mashed potato and mixed vegetables at the same time as US warplanes dropped bombs on Kunduz and Kandahar.
It had been a tough week for the media here and the conditions in the Spinghar Hotel in the city of Jalalabad - where 30 journalists were holed up - did nothing to improve the mood.
The Spinghar has seen better days. In King Zahir Shah's time, it was considered one of the best hotels in Afghanistan, with its beautiful gardens, sweeping balconies and high-ceilinged spacious bedrooms.
But like the rest of Afghanistan, the Spinghar Hotel is falling to pieces. The gardens, once home to glorious shrubs, flowers and laden fruit trees, are now overgrown and neglected. The guards at the entrance with their Kalashnikov rifles make the place even more uninviting.
Inside, we stay in filthy bedrooms with torn, ragged rugs on dusty lino floors, dirty walls and beds with musty, yellow sheets. It is a slight improvement from the first night when a mattress on the floor of one of the hotel's out-houses was my accommodation.
The showers are usually cold, when there's water, and doing the laundry involves scrubbing clothes in the sink, again when there's water.
The power supply is unpredictable. On Wednesday, it was gone for the whole day. I managed to write my stories in the dark on a balcony, powering my laptop with the Sky News generator.
Yet the worst feature of the hotel is the food. There are no trendy downtown restaurants to turn to. Dinner is the same every night - not very tasty rice and something which passes for chicken.
I had spotted one of the cooks chop meat with a huge cleaver on a dirty table placed outside the kitchen in the hot sun.
It was little wonder, then, that there was such joy on Thursday when the US journalists took a culinary initiative, keeping the Stars and Stripes flying amid the on-going Afghan crisis.
The rumour started circulating early in the day - eight turkeys had been spotted for sale in the Jalalabad bazaar. Lips were already being licked.
Some journalists were dispatched to buy potatoes, turnips, onions and carrots - anything they could get their hands on.
The hotel chef was happy to play his part. The turkeys were purchased and quickly met their end in the hotel yard, feathers scattered in every direction.
The birds were cooked, four to a pot, in ovens built into the ground out the back. They are normally used to bake bread.
The pots were then covered and hot embers placed on top.
At eight o'clock we filtered into the normally grotty dining room where nightly we had been forcing ourselves to eat the fare served up by the hotel to keep the energy levels up.
What a Thanksgiving transformation. All the tables had been placed in a long line. Somehow, somewhere, white tablecloths, perhaps a legacy from a grander era here, were found.
Flowers had been picked from the garden and a beautiful table arrangement made. The big pink flower in the middle was plastic but few noticed.
One by one, the eight turkeys appeared in a grand procession and were placed on the table. Bowls with bread stuffing, mashed potatoes, turnip and other vegetables followed.
The main organiser of this feast, Pamela Constable, of the Washington Post, said grace, and remembered the four journalists who were killed on the road from Jalalabad to Kabul last Monday. They had also been staying at the Spinghar Hotel.
There was no carving knife so turkey meat was torn off the birds by hand. Magically, someone produced a bottle of Bordeaux, a treat in this strictly Muslim country. Between the 35 of us there was only a thimbleful each but it tasted great.
The Swedish/Irish contingent managed to find a bottle of undrinkable Pakistani whiskey through "sources". And a Polish journalist produced a bottle of vodka.
It was a memorable meal. There are plenty of big personalities and colourful characters here. My companions for the week were Mats and Erich, two wonderful Swedes whose ages total 120, and who have clocked up five marriages between them. They kept me going through my darker moments.
However, shortly after 11p.m. we were jolted back to reality. As we savoured this sumptuous spread, US warplanes rumbled overhead.
They dropped their first bombs in the Jalalabad area since the departure of the Taliban. Their target was one of Osama bin Laden's hideouts high in the mountains nearby. The force of the bombs shook the hotel.
The novel Thanksgiving was over and it was time to go back to covering the war.
miriamd@163bj.com