What is with Canada that Thanksgiving is so early? Why don't we follow the American dates? Today there is a general answer first and a social political answer at the end.
A general answer is that festivals of thanks and celebrations of harvest took place in Europe in the month of October. We might note that all North Hemisphere inhabitants had a fall harvest celebration that dates back to the beginnings of communal living. These just aren't documented very well.
What is more important is that history is written with an orientation towards colonialist celebration. Our Canadian history writing is orientated around European settler celebrations. How do I know this? Our first documented European settler celebration of Thanks (vs harvest thanksgiving) was in 1578 with Martin Frobisher, the explorer. It occurred in Nunavut. I would be thankful too if I'd arrived in Nunavut - how did he get up there? I expect he got lost looking for the famed North-West Passage to the orient.
It seems to me an indication of historian orientation - to inject European settlers into every social context - to confuse Martin Frobisher's meal of thanks of survival with the traditional fall harvest thanks.
So on to turkey: the first documented harvest thanksgiving celebration featuring the uniquely North American turkey, squash and pumpkin wa in Nova Scotia in the 1750s and by the 1870s was common across Canada.
In Canadian provinces the date had moved around quite a bit - even as late as December 6th, and other times coinciding with American Thanksgiving.
Canada decided in 1957 to make Thanksgiving the second Monday in October, particularly to separate it from Remembrance Day - November 11th. It had co-occured before then to mark the sacrifices of veterans in the great Wars.
An excellent article on Canadian Thanksgiving was written in 2017, in McLean's Magazine HERE with a broader point of view.
The author, Christine Sismondo expresses clearly the concerns over European settlers and their dominance over the social landscape. Here's the concluding paragraph:
"Since the United States has thoroughly taken ownership of it (Thanksgiving) as a founding myth for its nation-building project, to the point that it’s practically eclipsed Canadian Thanksgiving, we could make the holiday our own by using it in a totally different way. A good start would be to acknowledge that Europe had pre-contact harvest feast traditions of their own, but to stop pretending Europeans invented Thanksgiving in Canada or the United States and, instead, consider how to repurpose the holiday to redress historical wrongs—and imagine a new Canadian identity."
I think we'll be keeping track of what Christine Sismondo has to say from now on.
Here's one of my favourite Autumn pictures - Charles Daley Park's gazebo under the yellow of Locust trees. And then here's Millie with her version of pumpkin pie.
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