This Monday, when students and faculty all over campus awake and honor Columbus, who sailed across the ocean blue to discover the New World and infest it with smallpox, their thoughts will no doubt turn to the other, America-related themes that followed: Pilgrims, the trade triangle, succotash, Plymouth Rock, shoes with enormous buckles and the City on a Hill, all of which lead the mind gently but inexorably to Thanksgiving, the annual commemoration of the day when Pilgrim and Native American sat together around a Common Table, Partaking of a Shared Harvest, and instituting a symbolic Moment of Peace and Mutual Understanding that would later be ripped to shreds in fits of righteous anger by capital-letter-hating high school Social Studies students everywhere.
However, there will be 30 or so persons here at Georgetown who awake Monday morning and skip directly over all thoughts of Mayflowers, large cone-shaped hats and new religious orders and proceed to envision turkey, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes and pumpkin pie. These individuals, among whom I am numbered, are Canadians, who celebrate Thanksgiving on the second Monday of October, when our friendly neighbors to the south are instead having a minor public holiday. Because I am a nerd of world-class proportions, I celebrate Thanksgiving every year in October here at Georgetown, irritating all those around me by planning an extensive dinner, strewing the house with decorative gourds and incorporating a cornucopia into the detritus on the kitchen table. These actions usually provoke a flurry of dirty, dirty words and occasionally the question, “Well, if you didn’t HAVE a symbolic Moment of Peace and Mutual Understanding around a Common Table, then why the hell are you celebrating Thanksgiving? What are you giving thanks for, you hockey-loving American wannabes?”
Funny you should ask. To best answer this question (since my previous response had been to mumble something about harvests and the approach of fall before staring in sullen silence at the cornucopia) I consulted the government of Canada’s website. As it happens, the story is a long and twisting one, with not a celebratory Dinner of Unity in sight. (Much to the dismay of myself and right-thinking high school students in the northern part of the continent.) General Thanksgiving days have been celebrated in Canada since 1799, and have been celebrated for such diverse reasons as for the “End of sanguinary contest in Europe and to give the Dominions blessings of Peace” in September, 1814 and “For God’s mercies and cessation of grievous disease” in January of 1850. Of course, since the 1880s the reason for days of Thanksgiving in Canada has overwhelmingly been for the “Blessings of an abundant harvest.” After years of annual proclamations in which the official day of Thanksgiving bounced around the various Mondays of the month, (and after a brief flirtation with Thursday celebrations in the heady days of the gay ‘90s) Thanksgiving Day was set as the second Monday in October in the official-sounding Proclamation of 1957. Therefore, the correct answer to the question, “What are you plaid-wearing, ‘abooot’-saying people giving thanks for?” is “An abundant harvest, you u-dropping bastards.” And if you perhaps wonder why the holiday is celebrated in October, rather than in November, the correct answer is that we prefer to celebrate the holiday a respectful distance away from the Christmas season, so as to give our retail-sales associates a better chance to stock their shelves with holiday-themed merchandise. The other answer, for the meteorologically-inclined, or “purists,” is that as a more northerly country, the harvest falls earlier in the calendar year.
So there you have it. The complete idiot’s guide to Thanksgiving above the 49th parallel, and certain fodder for modern-day Jayhawks and Columbus aficionados alike.
Happy Thanksgiving.
