Thanks in A Big World

Here in Canada, it is not Thanksgiving.  Thanksgiving occurred in September October, months ago, during the time when the sun came out with regularity and daylight savings time was still with us so that the night did not begin at 4 p.m.  Thanksgiving came when the stores had turkeys and fresh cranberries and tiny brussels sprouts.  And now it is November, and though the stores will again have turkeys a month from now, for now, it is roast chicken.  And, because it is just the two of us and we are leaving soon, it is a roasted frying chicken.  Is this humiliating, or is it not? 

The cranberries are the most puzzling part of all this.  Just south and east of Vancouver there are enormous cranberry bogs, but there are no fresh cranberries to be bought here in our market.  The produce man said to me that the store has them only in September, and after that they are all frozen.  In the freezer, was a bag of now-frozen, formerly fresh cranberries, whose brand was the American standard, Oceanspray.  But these Oceanspray cranberries come from south east of Vancouver.  And Oceanspray is headquartered in Lakeville, Massachusetts (a very small town, population: 10K now, but maybe 5K then) , where I lived from 1970-75.  Which maybe is why the absence of fresh cranberries looms large for me.

I endure; I endure this every year because we are always in the U.S. for Canadian Thanksgiving and in Canada for U.S. Thanksgiving.  But in Point Roberts, even though all the Canadian summer residents have cleared out by September, many come back, if the weather is nice, for their Canadian Thanksgiving.  And the International Market always drums up some turkeys for them to buy and roast.

In September, I was in the market at Point Roberts and got to talking with the guy in line ahead of me who was buying a turkey, presumably because of its being almost Canadian Thanksgiving.  He told me that his daughter was travelling in Europe this year, was at the moment in Holland.  She had told him that there was no turkey to be found in Holland, or at least not at any price that she could afford.  So he was buying this turkey now to freeze for her when she returned in a month or so, and then their Canadian Thanksgiving would, like ours, be held a little too close to Christmas.

This is what it is like living internationally.  I would always have thought that a turkey could be obtained any time, any place, if only a frozen one.  But not so.  Here in foreign Canada, as in foreign Holland and foreign France, there are no turkeys easily to be found in November.  Other things, also, I suppose.  The Australians who come here will find no vegamite on every market shelf; the Norwegians will find SkiQueen gyetost a specialty commodity, not to be found at just any cheese shop or counter.  The French will not find either the Americans or the Western Canadians (who knows about Quebec?) celebrating Bastille Day.  We are all different.  Disney was wrong: it’s a big world, after all.