When I arrived in New York in November 2000 I already had an invitation to Thanksgiving Dinner at Shaun's. Thanksgiving is a major tradition here in the U.S. and I was fortunate to able able to join in with that tradition as soon as I arrived.

For probably the majority of Americans, Thanksgiving is a time for family reunions and a once-a-year dinner with parents and siblings. For others, and particularly in New York where many people do not have family nearby, or even in the same country, it is a time to get together with friends.

In this latter tradition, Shaun has been holding Thanksgiving Dinners for many years now, and while this was my seventh, I'm still a relative newcomer to this circle.

The food is always astonishingly good. I don't know whether it got that way through a lot of trial and error with the earlier guests, but Shaun certainly seems to have mastered the staples of Thanksgiving Dinner - turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce and the various trimmings.

Most of the photos were taken later in the evening when the guests were a little more, er, relaxed. But the problem is that the photographer was relaxed too, so a number of the shots were badly out of focus. What you see here is what was worth publishing.