Marilyn's Photos - Oct 12 2025 - Canadian Thanksgiving
Each year at Thanksgiving, we celebrate our smart thinking in putting Canadian Thanksgiving in October well before Christmas and even before Halloween. Enough before Halloween that the Halloween decorations only start to come out before Thanksgiving, and then blossom thereafter. And we don’t have to worry about Thanksgiving and Christmas decor crashing into each other. Pumpkins will reign until the beginning of November, and then it is a transition into Christmas stuff. No orange Poinsettias for us.
Clearly, from our perspective, American Thanksgiving is too late. The google answer for why American Thanksgiving is so late is that it was meant to coincide with the end of the harvest period. Were they thinking of the Southern U.S? It certainly is well past the harvest season in the northern part of the U.S. and into Canada. Ours substantially concludes in October. Our outdoor market in Grimsby concluded this past week.
And then to prove my point, what is harvested in November? Leeks, brussels sprouts, and parsnips - vegetables that need a cold snap and frost to convert the starches to sugar.
November crops are further south in the U.S. with persimmons and pomegranates harvested in November. We have persimmons in October here - smaller than the southern U.S. varieties. But potatoes, squash, beets, carrots, pumpkins - have all been available for a while. Only pumpkins and squash need to wait till October to harden off. All the rest of the vegetables like beets, carrots, potatoes are all season long.
The decision for the late November date wasn’t because of tradition. The first American Thanksgiving was somewhere between Sept 21 and Nov 11, 1621. The mostly likely date was around Michaelmas - end of September.
Canada’s earliest thanksgiving was in 1578 when Martin Frobisher held a ceremony in Nunavut to give thanks for the safety of its fleet. The Times of India tells us that Canadian Thanksgiving is “rather low-key.” In contrast to Canada, Thanksgiving is one of the biggest holidays in the U.S. There are extra days to the holiday with parades, football games along with the Black Friday shopping extravaganza, followed by Cyber Monday shopping. Somehow shopping got in there, didn’t it?
To conclude our Canadian view of U.S. Thanksgiving, we repeat this picture comparison in two variations.
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