“Canadians invented insulin and Scotch tape and Hawaiian pizza. And we invented Thanksgiving.”
So says an article about the origins of Thanksgiving published in Vice.
A number of Canadians contributed to the piece investigating the holiday’s origins. Including American turned honorary Islander, PEI’s Michael Smith,
“Here in Canada, Thanksgiving is a bit more pure. It’s a genuine celebration of the harvest, while the American version is a wildly commercialized version of something that celebrates a fictional event that was flawed to begin with.”
The myth of the Pilgrims and the first American Thanksgiving is a troubling one.
And Arlene Stein, a Canadian expat living in Berlin, who summed it up quite well, “our harvest ritual started in Newfoundland 53 years before the pilgrims showed up in Plymouth.”
Of course, all of this is coming from a settler perspective. A recent CBC article quotes Jacqueline Romanow, who is Métis and chairs the Indigenous Studies Department at the University of Winnipeg. She says the holiday “supports the myth that this land was discovered. It creates this idea that the Indigenous people here just simply handed over everything to the new sort of arrivals, that there was no conflict, that it was a very peaceful and happy encounter — which, in fact, is the exact opposite of what happened.”
Thanksgiving was actually quite a loose holiday, with no formal date, until 1827, when, as MacLean’s reports:
“It might never have franchised out and come to take on such cultural significance if it weren’t for Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, a women’s magazine that promoted abolition, white wedding dresses, Christmas trees, a focus on the family, domestic science and the elevation of Thanksgiving to a national holiday with a set, universal date, so that the entire nation could pray and celebrate together.”
This weekend we will give thanks that our holiday is at the exact right moment in the year for a harvest feast, that we still have sunny days and blue skies, that our produce is at the peak of perfection. We give thanks for the ongoing work of Truth and Reconciliation and and that we live in a country that, as flawed as it is, still gives us much to be thankful for. As Montreal’s David McMillan so joyously told Vice, “We give thanks for not having Kim Kardashian at the top of our news feed. We give thanks for gun control.”
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!