Lisa Marie Presley and Gary Numan may well be indulging soon, and even Sir Paul McCartney could be living the American dream this month with Thanksgiving, the annual American celebration traditionally held on the fourth Thursday in November.

Hundreds of Americans living in Sussex have brought a little bit of the festive spirit back home across the pond, and Waitrose confirms it sees a rise in sales of the traditional foods associated with the Thanksgiving dinner at this time of year.

It seems that Elvis’s daughter Lisa Marie, who lives in Rotherfield, near Crowborough, with her husband Michael Lockwood and their twin daughters, will be cooking her turkey at home as her local pub, the King’s Arms, won’t be putting on a Thanksgiving dinner on November 22 this year. The question is whether she loves it tender...

Pop star Gary Numan could get his first taste of a real American Thanksgiving this year after announcing that he plans to move his family to America from Waldron, near Uckfield, after suffering “vile insults” in the village. But will vegetarian Sir Paul indulge his American wife Nancy Shevell with a roast turkey and all the trimmings at his farmhouse in Peasmarsh? He may need a little help from his friends.

One woman who is already excited about Thanksgiving this year is Sabina Palermo, a Texan living in Brighton.

Each November she flies the flag for her home country by inviting up to 15 of her British friends to a traditional Thanksgiving dinner of a huge turkey with gravy and cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes baked with maple syrup, brown sugar and marshmallows, vegetables in the colours of green, yellow and orange, and a pumpkin pie.

“I always ask my friends to do the American thing of saying something that they’re thankful for,” says Sabina, a jeweller who moved to Sussex five years ago and now works at Exclusive Jewellery in Union Street, Brighton. “They think it’s such an embarrassing thing to do, being British, but in this context everyone always ends up really liking it.”

Sabina, who has an American father and an English mother, holds her Thanksgiving on the Sunday after the traditional date, in order to bring together as many of her “urban family”, as she calls her friends, as possible.

“I do miss my own family and the family Thanksgiving,” she says, “I feel like I appreciate all the effort my mum made now that I have to organise and find the ingredients myself. But I always look forward to celebrating here in Brighton and it feels even more eventful and fun sharing it with people who aren’t used to the holiday. In America, Thanksgiving is so accepted I think they look past the significance at times.”

The day of public Thanksgiving was first declared by George Washington in 1789, but perhaps as early as 1607, some of the first settlers in Virginia were already thanking God for a good harvest with a bountiful feast of food.

Three years later, Thomas West, the 3rd Baron De La Warr, who was married to Cecily, the daughter of Sir Thomas Shirley of Wiston, Sussex, sailed across the Atlantic in his ship, The Deliverance, to take over the governorship of the first settled colony of Jamestown in Virginia, probably presiding over his new colony’s Thanksgiving feasts himself.

But history proclaims that the first official Thanksgiving feast was held in Massachusetts in 1621, a year of a good harvest for the starving colony at Plymouth. Their survival was thanks to the compassion of the local Wampanoag Native Americans, who gave them seeds and taught them to fish.

Traditionally a celebration of a good harvest, the date of Thanksgiving was a moveable feast until as recently as 1941, when President Franklin D Roosevelt made Thanksgiving a national holiday on the fourth Thursday in November by law.

To all Americans in Sussex, happy Thanksgiving!