Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. We had the family meal yesterday: chicken baked in a cranberry sauce, with rice pilaf and various vegetables. Dessert was supposed to be Thanksgiving Brownies (who isn't grateful for brownies?), but that's a sore subject and I shall save for another day my justifications for why their sludge-like consistency wasn't my fault. Fortunately, store-bought vanilla ice cream is always popular with the under-35 set.
Today, many stores are closed (including grocery stores). It's a normal three-day weekend here--I assume people are doing their usual fall activities. It's still hunting season. People are out on ATVs; I've seen them tearing up and down near the highway on paths that may become snowmobile trails in January, if we get snow. The men at church were complaining about being too busy to go to curling practice. Hockey practices have definitely started. And some brave soul went kayaking in the non-rainy one-hour window early yesterday evening.
I enjoy Thankgiving in Canada. It's such a low-key holiday compared to the hoop-de-doo in the U.S. People here do go shopping, of course. For many Canadians, a cross-border trip to get an early start on Christmas was a tradition long before the value of the loonie made it economically advantageous. However, the shopping is just that--people buying stuff. It's not the shopping equivalent of Ground Hog Day, a harbinger of the year's upcoming Most Important Economic Season (Christmas), as it is in the U.S. No navel-gazing element.
But what I really like about Thanksgiving in Canada is the lack of story. No pilgrims! And therefore, no smallpox-infested blankets, no "Christopher Columbus was a historical giant/spawn of Satan" discussions. And no stories such as burying dead fish in the corn hills to serve as fertilizer, which can lead to theories that our ancestors displaced people who were experts in sustainable agriculture and lived in idyllic balance with the planet, or that our ancestors displaced people who had already depleted the land so whatever impact we have isn't so bad (the always-popular "they started it" defense, with the "look over there, nothing to see here" misdirection).
Some of the Thanksgiving-themed decorations they sell here include pilgrim figurines, and people here buy them, for reasons beyond my comprehension. Maybe they take the pilgrims off when they get the fake corn/pumpkin/leaf thing home. But generally speaking, pilgrims are noticeably absent from the lives of adults.
At dinner yesterday, I checked into the lives of school children. Roy's Grade 2 grandson goes to a a French Immersion school. I asked him yesterday what they'd said in school about Thanksgiving. He said they didn't talk about it. That may be true, or he might have been thinking about something else when they covered it, or he may simply not have felt like being put on the spot at the Thanksgiving dinner table.
The lack of Thanksgiving Legend makes the holiday far less stressful for me. With the historical focus, if any, on giving thanks for the year's harvest, the meal becomes a celebration that one could invite any friend to--even, possibly, a friend who is part of a First Nation. ("Native American" to those south of 49.) Or any nation, which is also possible in Thunder Bay.
Thunder Bay is an odd amalgam of immigrants. The influx of Scandinavians (Finns, Swedes, Finn-Swedes, Danes, Norwegians) and people from Eastern Europe (Poles, Ukrainians) started after World War I. The post World War II years added Italians to the mix. Since the 1960s, the numbers of immigrants from Pakistan, India, Hong Kong, and South America have increased across Canada, and some have settled here. All of these groups joined those who trace their ancestry to Scotland and England, those few who had French voyageurs as ancestors, and the increasingly visible members of First Nations.
I don't know how many families in town keep their own ancestor's traditions (wherever those ancestors lived), and how many have gone the turkey-stuffing-potatoes-turnips-pumpkin route. But I enjoy picturing families gathered around their table, whether it holds lasagne, stir-fry, a roast turkey, pickled beets, kippered herring, a nice curry, or some combination thereof. Those tables hold many blessings for which to be grateful. I personally have a lot to be thankful for this year, as is true every year. I try to be grateful every day, not just the one day a year, but it never hurts to have the official day.
Now, if I could just master the art of baking up brownie mix without disaster.
