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It's Thanksgiving... U.S. style

Welcome to the sneak preview of the 2012-13 ski season.
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Welcome to the sneak preview of the 2012-13 ski season. You've been waiting impatiently and, well, THIS IS IT! No, I don't mean that sodden, waiting around in the rain at the base of the mountain to skim over 25cm of Slurpee nonsense Saturday morning. I mean what's happening up on the mountain now: Snow, snow, snow.

Whistler "opened" last weekend. Nothing wrong with opening early with — let's be generous — more terrain than any three Ontario ski hills combined! Early opening is always a good sign. But, honestly, this is really just the season's amuse bouche, the teaser foreshadowing what's to come. I mean Whistler wouldn't be Whistler with just Whistler, would it? It wouldn't be Blackcomb either but thank the lord the town isn't called Blackcomb, like Canada needs another town with a weird name, e.g., Head Smashed in Buffalo Jump, Chibougamau, Regina, Toronto.

Whistler without Blackcomb is like turkey without stuffing. Nourishing, but somehow lacking. A bouche without the amuse, and who needs another yapping bouche?

Fortunately, this bird's stuffing is coming. Good thing too. After all, our American friends — at least the ones comfortable spending time in the socialist paradise of Canada — are coming too.

That's because opening day on Blackcomb, and the official start of ski season, falls like clockwork on American Thanksgiving... at least until global warming forces it to fall on Christmas, a holiday in need of no national modifier.

Blackcomb's opening day is only called American Thanksgiving in Canada; in the U.S., it's called, well, Thanksgiving. Canadians call the holiday American Thanksgiving for much the same reason Canadians call Thanksgiving in Canada Canadian Thanksgiving. Canadians call Canadian Thanksgiving Canadian Thanksgiving because if they just called it Thanksgiving — like the Americans do — it would be confusing to other Canadians, and, like all things Canadian, confusing to Americans. If a Canadian were, for example, talking to another Canadian and said something like, "Hey, watcha doin' for Thanksgiving, eh?" the other Canadian will surely answer, "Canadian Thanksgiving or American Thanksgiving, eh?"

This makes no sense, of course. Canadian Thanksgiving comes early in October; American Thanksgiving comes late in November. Even Canadians know the difference between early October and late November; it's the difference between a baseball cap and a toque.

But what the anthropologically-inclined, cross-cultural observer has to understand is that Canadians are smart enough to understand whether we're talking about American Thanksgiving or Canadian Thanksgiving. We're just not secure enough to drop the national modifier. Living in the shadow of the giant as we do, we're hesitant to state unequivocally, even within their own borders, that there is one and only one Thanksgiving. It's really quite complicated and, after living here 25 years, I don't pretend to understand it. I simply acquiesce to get along, a very Canadian trait.

Regardless, I'd like to take this opportunity to give thanks for American Thanksgiving. I call it that, even though I'm a latent American now carrying a Canadian passport, because living in Canada all these years has made me more culturally sensitive. No, really. You should have known me before I moved to Canada.

One of the other reasons Canadians don't just puff out their chests and call Canadian Thanksgiving simply Thanksgiving is because the Canadian version lacks, how shall I say this, the rich mythology of American Thanksgiving.

Take timing for example. In what would someday become the U.S., the First Thanksgiving was celebrated in 1621. Early Americans didn't call it the First Thanksgiving. They didn't even call it Thanksgiving. They called it dinner. In actual fact, they called it a feast. But I digress.

Canadians didn't celebrate Thanksgiving until 1872, by which time, Americans were celebrating not only Thanksgiving but the rebirth of their country, compliments of their Civil War. Even at that late date, Canadians weren't actually celebrating Thanksgiving; they were celebrating the recovery of the Prince of Wales from a serious illness he'd been suffering. And — 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.

Now it doesn't take a geographical genius to understand there isn't much to harvest in Canada on April 15 unless you can make a feast of river ice and fiddleheads. Obviously, in that context, it's easier to understand why Canadians — who ultimately saw the irony of celebrating Thanksgiving in April and changed the date to more accurately coincide with the harvest of real food — were sheepish about honing in on what was clearly an American holiday and calling their version the exact same thing, Thanksgiving. Hence Canadian Thanksgiving.

Now, compare that tepid history with the rich cultural mythology of American Thanksgiving. Just the cast of characters alone is breathtaking. There's the starving Pilgrims, free at last to worship as they pleased. There's the generous, if naive Indians, sharing their bounty and completely ignorant of what a raw deal they were about to get. You've got turkey, mashed potatoes, pumpkin pie and Indian corn, which was nothing like either Niblets™ or corn on the cob. It was like hominy, which the Indians made by soaking rock-hard corn kernels in lime leftover from the Indian ceremony of Margarita, Maiden of Rollicking Times. The Pilgrims, misunderstanding the native pronunciation of the word hominy, thought the Indians were offering hegemony and so, took advantage of their generosity and drove them onto reservations from sea to shining sea. But that's a different history lesson.

Regardless, American Thanksgiving is the single most important, family-centric holiday in the U.S. From coast to coast, and even in Hawaii, American families come together from whatever far-flung corners of the empire they've settled in. They gather to watch their women make a dinner that would feed a third-world village while their men watch football and complain about how stupid the coaches are and how much the players make.

It's been calculated the quintessential American Thanksgiving dinner — turkey, stuffing, potatoes and gravy, green bean casserole, candied yams, pumpkin pie and ice cream — weighs in at about 3,700 calories... before seconds. That may seem excessive to anyone who has never needed a seat belt extension on an airplane but given what comes next, it's understandable. No, I'm not referring to the tryptophan-induced coma that knocks everyone out until they wake up for a midnight snack. I'm talking about Black Friday.

Black Friday follows American Thanksgiving like "Sorry, dude," follows a collision with a snowboarder. It's the biggest shopping day of the year and it starts, in many places, at midnight sharp. There is nothing like it in Canada and, for that, I am truly thankful.

And that would be Canadian and American thankful, since I inhabit both solitudes.