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Kicking off the season with the bird

by G.D. Maxwell Welcome to the 2004-05 ski season. You’ve been waiting impatiently and, well, THIS IS IT! Sure, Blackcomb opened last weekend. Nothing wrong with that, always a good sign, but let’s admit it, it’s just the appetizer.

by G.D. Maxwell

Welcome to the 2004-05 ski season. You’ve been waiting impatiently and, well, THIS IS IT!

Sure, Blackcomb opened last weekend. Nothing wrong with that, always a good sign, but let’s admit it, it’s just the appetizer. Whistler wouldn’t be Whistler with just Blackcomb. It wouldn’t be Blackcomb either since that would be too weird a name for a place notwithstanding Canada’s penchant for weird name places, e.g., Head Smashed in Buffalo Jump or Toronto.

But Blackcomb without Whistler is like mashed potatoes without gravy. This is not to mix metaphors and say mashed potatoes are appetizers or anything like that. Everybody knows they’re condiments.

And everybody knows they are one of several mandatory condiments that go with turkey, which is what our American friends – the ones who are still willing to brave the slings and arrows of Canada’s merciless wrath – will be eating après on opening day.

That’s because opening day on Whistler, and the official start of the 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. Whistler’s opening day is only called American Thanksgiving in Canada; in the US, it’s called Thanksgiving. Canada calls it 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. If a Canadian were, for example, talking to another Canadian and said something like, "Hey, watcha doin’ for Thanksgiving, eh?" the other Canadian might well 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 cross-cultural observer has to understand – and I’m especially talking to Dave Myrick here; hope you’re reading Dave, love ya baby – is that Canadians are smart enough to understand whether they’re talking about American Thanksgiving or Canadian Thanksgiving. They’re just not secure enough, living in the shadow of the giant as they have all their nationalistic lives, to state unequivocally, even within their own borders, that there is one and only one Thanksgiving. It’s very complicated and after living here 25 years I still barely understand it. On the other hand, Dave, you have to bear in mind Americans, by which I mean the people of the U.S., are the only people in the world who call going out with someone else and each person paying their own way Dutch Treat. The rest of the world calls it American Style. Go figure.

I’ll get back to you later, Dave, but let me just take this opportunity to give thanks for American Thanksgiving. I call it that, even though I’m an American. It’s because living in Canada all these years has made me more culturally sensitive. No, honest. You should have known me before I moved to Canada.

One of the other reasons Canadians don’t just puff their chests out and start to get comfortable calling 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. Actually, 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, forged in the crucible of 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 th , 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 th 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 – are sheepish about horning in on what was clearly an American holiday and calling their version the exact same thing. Hence Canadian Thanksgiving.

Now, compare that sordid history with the 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. You’ve got the generous Indians, sharing and completely ignorant of what a raw deal they were about to get. You’ve got turkey, mashed potatoes, punkin pie and Indian corn. Indian corn wasn’t like Niblets™ and it wasn’t like 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, naturally, 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.

Back to Dave. Dave, your letter in last week’s Pique made my heart heavy. C’mon back, dude. Give us another chance. We don’t hate Americans. We just hate George Bush. Cut us some slack. Forty-nine per cent of your very own countrymen don’t much care for the guy either. Forty per cent of your fellow North Carolinians thought the other guy was the better candidate. And let’s not get into how the rest of the world feels about the guy.

Dave, I’d like you to consider for just a moment how small your world might get if you let some silly thing like anti-American sentiments determine where you vacation. For starters, your skiing would pretty much be limited to Colorado and Utah. Nothing wrong with either of those places but I’m certain we – Whistleratics – can go ’em one better.

And Dave, don’t, whatever you do, think of Squamish as indicative of true Canadianness. You know those little, in-bred towns in the far reaches of your own North Carolina, the kinds of towns you can’t drive through without automatically locking your doors and humming the song from Deliverance. Well, Squamish isn’t that bad, and it’s getting better. It’ll even have a Wal-Mart soon and you know what a civilizing influence that is.

So give us one more try. You won’t like Silver Star, Dave. I’ll even toss in a Maxed Out tour of Whistler, Blackcomb and the best bars in Whistler. We’ll go Dutch. Love ya, Dave, love ya. Enjoy the bird.