Monday is Thanksgiving Day. Everyone south of the border who has heard of Canada and those who visit here regularly call it Canadian Thanksgiving. Kind of like Canadian bacon. Kind of not.
It seems preposterous to call it Canadian Thanksgiving in Canada, though. Apologetic and subservient, almost. Stand up and be counted—it’s Thanksgiving. Period.
People in the U.S. celebrate Columbus Day on Monday, and, since 2021, Indigenous Peoples’ Day. If that seems ironic, bear in mind the latter grew out of a United Nations conference about discrimination that took place in 1977. Thirteen years later, another UN conference looked into replacing Columbus Day entirely, leaving Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
In the highly polarized U.S., that naturally gave rise to yet another culture war. As of this year, just over 25 per cent of states celebrate the new holiday. But I digress.
In Canada, we hold Thanksgiving, a celebration of bounty and successful harvest, on the second Monday in October. There are several good reasons for picking that date. Farmers, which is what most Canadians were when the whole Thanksgiving thing started in the 19th century, were smart enough to know if we celebrated it in November when folks in the U.S. do, there wouldn’t be much bounty left and we’d have to load our holiday table with frozen food. As it is, we load it with frozen turkey—but let’s not split hairs.
The U.S. celebrates American Thanksgiving—Hah! Take that!—on the last Thursday in November. The last Thursday in November coincides with harvest time in Havana. By then, most of the corn in Iowa is in cans, and most Iowans are wishing the presidential primaries were held somewhere else so they could enjoy their own frozen turkey dinner without a rancorous political debate spoiling their appetites and splitting families apart.
It’s pretty easy to keep the two Thanksgivings straight, even without the geographic modifiers. Thanksgiving in Canada? October, three weeks-ish before Halloween. Thanksgiving in the U.S.? November, a month before Christmas. In most of Canada, it’s the difference between wearing a baseball cap and a toque.
So why the confusion?
One of the primary reasons is, how shall I say this, the richer mythology of American Thanksgiving.
Americans got a head start on Canadians when it came to celebrating Thanksgiving. In what would someday become the U.S., the First Thanksgiving was celebrated in 1621. It involved Pilgrims—iconic, short people in early American history with unusual hats and shoes and a way of walking that reminded people of penguins, from which their name was derived. The Pilgrims didn’t call that celebratory—and for many of them, lifesaving—meal the First Thanksgiving. They didn’t call it Thanksgiving at all. They called it dinner. Actually, they called it a feast.
Canadians didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving until 1872, by which time, Americans were celebrating not only Thanksgiving but the rebirth of their country, forged in the crucible of civil war. Canada, on the other hand, wasn’t even a complete country then. And to further confuse matters, Canadians weren’t actually celebrating Thanksgiving; they were celebrating the recovery of the Prince of Wales from a serious illness he’d been suffering. On top of that—you’ll think I’m making this part up, but I’m not—they celebrated it on April 15, a day Americans were celebrating filing their income taxes, which didn’t actually exist until 1909.
It doesn’t take an agricultural genius to understand there is even less to harvest in Canada on April 15 than late November, unless you can make a feast of river ice and fiddleheads. Obviously, within that context, it’s easier to understand why Canadians are sheepish about horning in on what was clearly an American holiday and calling their version the exact same thing. Nevertheless…
Comparing the rather tepid beginnings of Canadian Thanksgiving to the rich, cultural mythology of American Thanksgiving begins to shed some light on our seeming reluctance to make a big deal out of it. Consider, the main characters in early Canadian Thanksgiving were a sickly prince and farmers, and dinner, as best as anyone knows for sure, consisted of flaccid cabbage, punky potatoes, fiddleheads and river ice.
The American Thanksgiving cast of characters alone is breathtaking. There were starving Pilgrims, free at last to worship and plunder as they pleased. Generous, if naive, Indigenous People sharing their bounty, completely ignorant of what a raw deal they were about to get. And the food—turkey, mashed potatoes, punkin pie and Indigenous Peoples’ corn—they called it maize. As corn goes, it wasn’t like Niblets™ and it wasn’t like corn on the cob. It was like hominy, which Indigenous Peoples made by soaking rock-hard corn kernels in lime leftover from their ceremony of Margarita, Queen of Tomorrow’s Headache.
In Whistler, the whole Thanksgiving confusion is further heightened because Thanksgiving falls during a time of year we generally refer to as the shoulder season. It’s the time everyone who can afford to gets out of town and goes somewhere it isn’t raining all the time. As a result, many miss Thanksgiving because, for example, nobody eats turkey in Maui or Costa Rica in October.
But on this Thanksgiving week, I would like to say there are numerous things for which I am thankful. Here are just a few.
I’m thankful I live in the best town I can imagine to live in, even though summer in Whistler is taxing. Despite all the grumbling and whining, this is a deeply connected and caring town. Our caring has been sorely tested of late. We seem to be losing good people at an alarming rate. But whether they leave for other places or places unknown, we gather to celebrate them, remember them and keep their memories close. It’s an endearing part of this town’s culture.
I’m thankful for the leadership we’ve enjoyed here. No, seriously. It hasn’t been perfect, but it’s been a damn sight better than many places. While too much focus may have been placed on becoming a world-class resort, while not enough limitations were placed on making it a playground for the rich, it was the far-sighted vision of some who cobbled together a housing model that provides secure homes for many of us to stick around and enjoy a rich lifestyle while being monetarily challenged.
I’m forever thankful I moved to Canada more than four decades ago. More so every time I dip south of the border and see a country I hardly recognize.
I’m thankful two important women in my life tricked me into going skiing 40 years ago.
And I’m thankful Bob Barnett gave me an opportunity to inflict this piffle on you all those years ago.
Happy Thanksgiving.
