American Thanksgiving

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Thanks for your patience! We’re back from our long road trip to the States, finally. It’s wonderful being able to see my family, but I’m happy to be home (and the cats are certainly happy to see us, too.)

One of the stops on our trip was to have Thanksgiving dinner with my mother’s family in Pennsylvania. Growing up, I had never given Thanksgiving a lot of thought as to what the holiday entailed. We either hosted a large number of family members at our house, or we travelled to someone else’s house where we became the visiting family. Large quantities of food were consumed, and the time was passed chatting and watching some of the various bowl games for college football.

Now, living in Canada, it’s interesting being able to see this American holiday from a Canadian perspective. At work, most of our clients are based in the States. As a result, we typically have the American holidays off. I was amused when I first heard my co-workers referring to the US Thanksgiving holiday as “bigger than Christmas,” but as I started to think about it I realized they were right. Christmas might be the most important holiday to the US economy, but Americans themselves place a lot of importance on Thanksgiving. After all, they usually only get one day off for Christmas, but Thanksgiving garners two days off (unless you work in retail).

I wondered about that for a while. After discussing it with my husband, we concluded that it might be due to a few things. First, Thanksgiving is a major holiday that has no religious implications, thus giving it a universal appeal. It doesn’t matter if you’re Christian, Muslim, Hindu or athiest, everyone can enjoy sitting down with family to a fantastic feast. After all, the “first Thanksgiving” was originally celebrated with the Christian pilgrims, a few converted Christian Native Americans, and a tribe of Native Americans who did not follow Christianity.

Secondly, Thanksgiving cannot be merchandised, no matter how hard companies may try. Oh, you can buy turkey decorations for your yard, and ceramic cornucopia centerpieces for the table, but the basic Thanksgiving boils down to family+friends+food=holiday. There are no gifts, except for the bottle of wine that your mother-in-law always insists on bringing. So unless you buy your friends, the only thing you need to spend money on is the food, as little or as much as you want.

Maybe it’s just a matter of perspective, but it just doesn’t seem that Thanksgiving is as big of a deal in Canada as it is the in the States. Oh, people will go all out with turkeys and whatnot, but it just seems to be lower-key here. I’m not sure why. (Maybe because it’s on a Monday? Or because it’s so far away from Christmas?) On the other hand, Christmas seems to be a much larger deal here than in the US. I guess it’s all perspective.

Anyway, welcome to December! It’s time to start planning Christmas cookies, hams and pot-luck contributions. Whee!

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