November 2009 
November 1, Sunday, All Saints Day : Christian.
All Saints Day honors the saints of the Roman Catholic Church and is a holy day of obligation, hence a public holiday, in many Catholic countries.
FOOD AND DRINK
The Spanish make a hollow cookie called huesos de santo, saints’ bones, by rolling dough around a piece of bamboo and frying it. The hollow cookie is filled with cream or custard and dusted with sugar and cinnamon.
November 1, Sunday, Day of the Dead (Día de los Muertos) : Mexico.
Many Catholic countries honor their departed relatives on this day. While they may clean and decorate family graves, the day is not mournful; rather, it is a festive occasion, with treats for children.
In Mexico people decorate graves with orange marigolds, the flowers of the dead. Families picnic, often at the graveside, and have a good time at village or neighborhood fiestas.
FOOD AND DRINK
Candy skulls and skeletons are popular treats for Día de los Muertos in Mexico. There are baked goods, too, such as pan de muerto, a sweet bread decorated with bones and skulls and colored sprinkles. Sweet confections based on peanuts, coconut, sesame seeds, pumpkin, and sweet potato are popular, as are stuffed peppers of various sorts and tamales. These are mixtures of white cornmeal with meat, vegetables, and seasonings cooked inside a banana leaf or other large leaf, which keeps them moist.
Many other countries have special cakes or cookies for the day. In southern Italy, bakers and housewives make colored marzipan fruit called martorana. It is packed into baskets with nuts and pomegranates for children, who are told that their ancestors have left it as a gift. Throughout the country there are skull- or bone-shaped cookies called osso da mordere, dead men’s bones, made from ground almonds and eggs, sometimes flavored with cocoa. Fave dei morti, dead men’s beans, are butter cookies flavored with rum or brandy. Like the marzipan fruit of the south, these cookies are hidden as a present to the children from the departed ones.
Balkan countries — Bulgaria, Rumania, Albania, Greece, and the republics of the former Yugoslavia — make a dish called kolivo or zhito. Wheat is soaked and boiled for many hours. When it is soft, it is dried, then flavored with walnuts, cinnamon and sugar, formed into a large mounded mass, and then dusted with confectioners’ sugar on which symbols are outlined, often using small silver balls or dragees. In Greece it often includes raisins and parsley. Almonds are used to make a cross and the initials of the dead.
This dish is also made for funerals and at the masses said at set intervals after a person has died.
November 26, Thursday, Thanksgiving Day : United States.
This holiday commemorates the first harvest of the English colonists who settled in Massachusetts in the early 1620s. It is the most important day for family get-togethers and, apart from watching football on TV, activities center around eating.
FOOD AND DRINK
Thanksgiving foods recall those eaten at the first Thanksgiving in Plymouth: turkey, cranberries, corn, and winter squash. Research shows that the Pilgrims also ate fish and seafood. Occasionally, therefore, Thanksgiving soups such as oyster stew are served (see recipe for Christmas Eve). Side dishes usually include vegetables native to the Americas: potatoes, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, and peppers, for example. Pumpkin pie is the most popular dessert, followed closely by apple pie, pecan pie, cherry pie, and mincemeat pie. succotash with ham and creamy pearl onions are also avorite dishes at this time of year.
COLORS
Autumnal colors such as orange, yellow, red, and brown are associated with Thanksgiving.