We just celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving here (or as we call it, Thanksgiving). I bet you didn’t know that was a thing, did you, America? We have more in common than you think. For example, well, umm.. we all hate Nickelback! That’s one thing I have learned from Canadica so far; everyone hates Nickelback. Except for those millions of people who keep buying their albums. If I could go back to New Years Eve in 1998 when I was stranded in Edmonton and gently encourage my friend’s crappy band “Nickel Back.. because when you buy a pack of smokes, you get the nickel back.. get it?” to invest in the tech boom instead of making music, I totally goddamned would. We all have regrets.
Thanksgiving: A Comparison
If pop culture tells me anything at all, every single family in America has two adorable children. One is a bright but humorless girl who suffers her wiseacre brother. And everyone has a funny grandma. And every year at your Thanksgiving there is some sort of hilarious but totally PG-13 disaster but you overcome it, then join hands and tell everyone what you’re grateful for over a glistening turkey, with that weird sweet potato marshmallow thing. Thanksgiving dinner is just various foodstuffs acting as a vector to get butter in your mouth.
Such a beautiful and enduring image of American Thanksgiving. Courtesy of Bill A on flickr
No one’s uncle shows up and sticks a fork in their forehead trying to do an impression of Ruprecht in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. My Canadian Thanksgiving is a drunk, cracked out version of this:
Maybe that’s just my family.
After eating half your weight, everyone sits like torpid snakes (no judgement, I totally did that too) watching football. It is entirely possible that there is Canadian football on our Canadian Thanksgiving, but I don’t watch that stuff. I bet you didn’t know we had that either. It’s like American football, but our players still need to work at Home Depot (also something we have here) in the off-season to pay their roommate back all that rent. There’s one less down and it’s a bigger field, plus everyone is tired from doing inventory at Home Depot. I don’t even know what that means, I am just typing as my husband talks. Our Olympic athletes are also treated in the same way, except for the hockey players who are revered like gods and whose feet never touch the bare ground.
Canada, according to our football fans. Is that prettier, Speaker7? Would you stick your Florida in us now? – Image via CFL.ca
And the next day, Canadians just go back to our regular lives and vaguely ponder our Halloween costumes rather than trampling each other to death for heavily discounted consumer goods in the name of saving the economy.
Although now that Target is coming to Canada, I could get behind a good trampling. Photo by Michael Holden on flickr
But most importantly, American Thanksgiving is steeped in lore. The drama of it all; starving pilgrims reaching out to people their ancestors would later slaughter with smallpox blankets and taking their precious winter stores because they were too arrogant to copy native farming methods. Oh, the richness. We have no such Thanksgiving tale. There’s no pageantry. You’re lucky to get a hand turkey from your kids, much less have them dress up like adorable little pilgrims for stage a production worthy of Broadway.
Iconic image of child labour for a lovingly detailed recreation of Thanksgiving’s origins. Image via dvdtalk.com
I had to make my own hand turkey. Thanks for nothing, daycare.
This makes me sad. We just sit around and stuff our faces and drink enough booze to cope with our family with no real purpose. It’s basically the same as Christmas.
So here’s my proposition. Write our Thanksgiving story. Make it sing. To sweeten the deal, I will send the winner the original hand turkey featured in this post if they’re demented enough to want it. I think it would make a charming hostess gift for American Thanksgiving, or a lucky Canadian could use to heat their house for winter. Those pipe cleaners weren’t free, you guys.
Post your stories by midnight on Sunday, October 14th and I will choose a winner before the next Canadica post goes up next week. You can either post in the comments below, or if it’s long and you’re really inspired post to your own blog and put the link in here.
For more general holiday disaster ideas, visit the Rollergiraffe on her blog at rollergiraffe.com.
Welcome to Canadica! 
