Thanks, Here and There

Last week was Canada’s Thanksgiving; next month is the U.S. Thanksgiving. Same holiday, different countries? If so, why six weeks apart? Perhaps it is the case that whatever country you are born/raised in, that country’s customs, holidays, ways of being are incorporated as originals with every other country being considered somewhat derivative. Or perhaps U.S. citizens are particularly prone to this me-first-ism. Either explanation seems viable to me. In any case, when I moved to the Northwest and began to move back and forth between Canada and the U.S., I just assumed that the Canadians must have picked up Thanksgiving from us, but had decided to move it to a different time to differentiate their experience of it from ours. The different date, however, constantly eludes me. I can never remember exactly which month it is in (September? October?) or when in the month it occurs. It’s not at the end of November is all I know.

This year, toward the end of September, our neighbors invited us to their Thanksgiving dinner and I was happy to accept the invitation, except that I somehow assumed that it would be toward the end of October and not toward the beginning of October. I mean, how can I be expected to remember not only that it isn’t in November but that it also isn’t toward the end of the month? As a result, I was left making sorry excuses and apologies when, shortly before the 13th, it came to my attention that Canadian Thanksgiving was quickly approaching and we were residing in the wrong country to be dropping over for dinner.

This kind of thing happens to me not infrequently. This results from coming to a second country late in life. You’ve already gone way past the time and place where you are supposed to learn all the important cultural knowledge and any further learning is likely to be embarrassing because you don’t actually know what you don’t know and you just stumble into it. For example, I knew that Canadians celebrate Victoria Day, and also that they celebrate Canada Day and B.C. Day. I understood that Canada Day was sort of like the U.S. July 4th. But we don’t have anything like B.C. Day, so there was no parallel for it or Victoria Day. However, I jumped to the conclusion that because B.C. Day was a celebration of the Province’s coming into being, Victoria Day must be a celebration of the Province’s Capital’s (Victoria) coming into being. I couldn’t have been more surprised to discover that it was about Queen Victoria’s birthday. I imagine every B.C. schoolchild knows that, but I wasn’t here at the right time to learn it.

Month in, month out, I find myself astonished to find yet something else I have been confused about. It’s a humbling experience when repeated so frequently. And as for Thanksgiving? Well, the first Canadian Thanksgiving was celebrated in 1578 by English explorer Martin Frobisher, whereas the Pilgrims weren’t even thinking about getting to the New World at that time, let alone making friends with Squanto and the fish and corn thing and all that; not until 1620 could they put in their claim. So the Canadians didn’t exactly ‘get it from us.’ The U.S. government frequently declared ‘Days of Thanksgiving’ and individual states also did this periodically, but it wasn’t until 1863 that Thanksgiving, the last Thursday in November, became a statutory holiday for all states.

Canada, too, had Thanksgiving Days periodically declared for many years, but after World War I, Canada amalgamated Armistice Day and Thanksgiving, only separating them in 1931. Not until 1957, however, was Thanksgiving moved to the 2nd Monday in October. Interestingly, it is not a statutory holiday in Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick. If I had lived here all my life, I’d probably know all that without having to look it up. Without engaging in research, however, I can say with absolute confidence that we both do turkey and football for Thanksgiving.