Happy Thanksgiving! That’s what a few folks wished me last week, up here, north of the 49th parallel.
Thanksgiving! Yeah. Right. You’re a bit early, aren’t you? But of course, my good neighbours were talking about Canadian Thanksgiving.
The difference, I thought, was a big one. In the US, where I grew up, Thanksgiving was huge. Absolutely huge. Family and extended family would gather every year, with great regularity, on the fourth Thursday of November. About 40 of us would descend on one home as dusk crept into the sky. The hosts were responsible for the turkey and stuffing. Aunt Ramona always brought green beans with bacon bits and crunchy onions. Aunt Nancy’s specialty was always rice pudding. My mom always made us suffer through Jell-O salad: green Jell-O mixed up with cottage cheese and pineapple bits, solidified in a bundt mold and served on a thin bed of iceberg.
“Always” was the operative word in the family. Thanksgiving was always the same; we only got older. For dessert (as rice pudding and Jell-O “salad” hardly qualified), we’d always endure the great pumpkin pie debate. I was in the mild corner. Grandma Peterson’s pie – dear as our matriarch was – always was clobbered by nutmeg. And then, bellies full, the guys would waddle to the den, where they’d watch football. Or sleep. The women would scurry between the dining table and kitchen, dirty dishes always clattering, high-pitched voices always chattering. It was a division of labour that drove me dotty.
Like the holiday or not, Thanksgiving is a matter of celebration in the US. Always. Our family was hardly alone. Thanksgiving is among the busiest times in US airports as families flock together for the purposes of consuming vast amounts of turkey and despairing over all they ate. Perhaps some folks even spare a thought for the country’s founding fathers, the Pilgrims who schlepped their way across the Atlantic in 1620 – those hardy folks who endured that first, harsh winter in the New World with little food or shelter, the ones who cooperated with local Indians and learned how to grow corn and barley and pumpkins. US Thanksgiving celebrates the Pilgrims and the crops that sustained their early days in our yet-to-be-established country. Some people believe that Thanksgiving exists merely as the starting gunshot for the Christmas buying frenzy. Yes, big sales are part of the US Thanksgiving tradition, but the holiday is much more than that.
I moved out of the US in my early 20s, but Thanksgiving followed me. Whether living in England or South Africa or France, I usually found an American to share the festivities. But I brought others into the fold, too. I often cooked the bird myself (or as close to a whole turkey as I could find) and introduced Brits, Norwegians, Swiss, Ukrainians, South Africans, Irish, Indians – basically anyone who was willing to eat – to the American tradition. Once I even cooked for a Canadian called James. He was a starving student and was pleased to take part in a once-a-year gorge-fest, even under the US name.
There was one guy, though, who ruined my Thanksgiving stats. Thanksgiving Thursday years ago, I’d baked a pumpkin pie to share with colleagues at the British investment bank where I worked; Thanksgiving was, of course, hardly a holiday on that side of the pond. “Is it sweet or savoury?” was the typically British reaction to the pie’s muddy appearance, but everyone ate the stuff – even if it wasn’t their new antidote for scones and clotted cream. I cut a particularly large wedge of pie for the lanky, 20-something guy who was temping for us. Young, skinny guys are always hungry, after all. The temp moved on to a different firm a couple weeks later. When I cleaned out the top drawer of his desk, I found that big piece of pie.
Thanksgiving – the proper, US Thanksgiving, whether celebrated in the US or afar – is big. Among Yanks, it’s practically evangelical. It may seem like the launching pad to Christmas, but it’s a proper holiday in its own right.
Which made me all the more curious about the Canadian version. The “Happy Thanksgiving” declarations along Toronto’s streets seemed more polite and less zealous than I was used to. Often they were followed by this stunner: “Are you celebrating?”
What, there’s a question?
Thanksgiving being a Monday – the second Monday of October, the same day Americans call Columbus Day – my Canadian in-laws decided to eat on Sunday, the day earlier. Sunday becoming inconvenient, they moved the feast to Saturday. Canadian Thanksgiving, I learned, is flexible.
In my quest for understanding, I asked Pierre: What’s Canadian Thanksgiving all about? He wasn’t sure.
Do you guys (meaning you Canadians) even have Pilgrims? I asked. Um, no. I don’t know. Pierre’s intelligent response was followed by an excuse: I don’t think we even celebrated it in Quebec (where he grew up).
Which, I presume, makes Canadian Thanksgiving a bit less wholly Canadian.
Canadian Thanksgiving, I have learned doing my own research, is, indeed, wholly disconnected from any notion of Pilgrims. There are no speeches about the country’s founding fathers and their miserable journey across the Atlantic. The feasting, if there is any, is wholly linked to the harvest. End of story.
And then I discovered that I may have been a smidgeon wrong about the Canadians having less allegiance to their Thanksgiving heritage than their southern neighbours. Through a highly un-statistical survey, I found that Canadian folks actually celebrate the holiday more than I’d given them credit for. One Canadian friend, in fact, insisted that Canadian Thanksgiving had more merit – and deeper roots – than the US one!
This friend recently returned to Canada after years living on American soil. It was Canadian Thanksgiving’s mid-October timing that she celebrated. It was practical. Canadian Thanksgiving falls before Halloween, not after. Her pumpkins were still beautiful, perfect Thanksgiving decorations yet un-massacred by her children. The October timing also meant that Canadian Thanksgiving remained separated from Christmas festivities – and, well, that a harvest feeling was still in the air.
Okay, she made some fair points. But here was the clincher: Why on earth, my newly-returned Canadian friend wondered, did the Americans change the date of their Thanksgiving?
Ha! So American Thanksgiving is a bastardized Canadian holiday! Who knew?
True, Canada is north of the US. It is, after all, the Great White North. The country’s growing season finishes before the US one, so earlier harvest celebrations make sense. But Thanksgiving has remained a steadfast holiday in the US, falling on that fourth Thursday of November (or to be technically correct in the pre-World War II era, on the last Thursday of November), basically since 1863. That dates back to the Civil War!
It’s the Canadians who changed their dates around. In post-US Civil War year of 1879, Parliament declared November 6th as Canadian Thanksgiving. Over the years that date floated around in October and November with the whims of the time. For full disclosure, some sources say there was a ten-year period after World War I when the US and Canada celebrated Thanksgiving on the same day – the Monday of the week in which November 11th occurred. But soon the holidays went their separate ways again. The Yanks went back to celebrating at the end of November. And it wasn’t until 1957 that Canada’s Parliament fixed its standing date for Thanksgiving at the second Monday of October.
So the Americans’ end-of-November date has deeper roots than the Canadians’ mid-October one. The Yanks have been celebrating longer. Or maybe not. Also according to history books, the first traditional US Thanksgiving was celebrated in 1621, the year after the Pilgrims’ wretched Atlantic crossing. The Canucks easily gazzump this date. Looking for a northern passage to the Orient, the English explorer Martin Frobisher landed in what today is Newfoundland. He eventually formed a settlement there and held a ceremony to give thanks for surviving the long journey. That all happened in 1578.
But there is an earlier attested Thanksgiving celebration – perhaps a one-off – that happened among Spanish settlers in 1565. Today this spot is known as Florida.
History, schmistory. Who cares. What matters, the really marvelous thing about Thanksgiving, is this: The day is a worthwhile holiday. Yanks might claim it as their idea. Canucks – that large swell of the population that celebrates – might think the holiday was their brainchild. But doesn’t everybody want to be the mastermind behind any good idea?
Joyeux Action de Grâce, my French teacher wished us after class last week. He’s a robust man, sturdily built and full of wit and drama. He grew up in Provence and then took a Canadian wife.
What – are you going to celebrate? I asked him.
Bouf. He shrugged his ample shoulders. It’s a holiday about food. Of course I’ll celebrate it!
He had a point. Like my French teacher, I was the outsider looking in. Who’d possibly turn down a food-fest?
So Pierre cooked the Canadian bird. He made all his mother’s traditional favourites – though these dishes hardly graced any Thanksgiving table in his childhood home. Alongside the turkey, Pierre prepared his mother’s stuffing (one that I personally detest). He made mashed potatoes. Squash is right out in his book, but carrot and turnip puree worked just fine. Pumpkin pie was a complete no-go, too. He threatened to bake a maple syrup pie, but his daughter saved the meal with an apple variety.
As for me, I’ll keep my heartfelt “Happy Thanksgiving”’s until November. I’ve already brought the holiday to three foreign lands. Why stop evangelizing the proper holiday just north of the border?
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