A Happy Thanksgiving To All Of Our Canadian Readers

By Doug Draper

Have a nice Thanksgiving.

I have been saying it all week to people to most of the people I have had any sort of a chat with on the Canadian side of the border –people I’ve talked to on the phone, the store clerk that showed me which shelf the cat food was on and the guy who sold me a new clothes dryer.

Funny thing is that it wasn’t until the Saturday of this Canadian Thanksgiving weekend that someone said; ‘Have a nice Thanksgiving’ to me before I said it to them, and as someone who is a native Canadian  but is also somewhat of a closet American, in spirit anyway, I find that a bit strange. 

Not that it is something that keeps me awake at night. There are so many other things to worry about in this crazy world that can do that. But as somewhat of a closet American who has numerous American friends and who joins a gathering of many of them down on Cape Cod each American Thanksgiving during the last week of November, I have long been moved by how seriously our American neighbours take Thanksgiving.

You can be down on the Cape a full week before the Thursday when Thanksgiving is observed, or you can be right across the border in Buffalo for that matter,  and there is hardly a person you cross paths with would doesn’t wish you a nice Thanksgiving with a good deal of warmth behind it. A number of my American friends say they actually enjoy Thanksgiving more than Christmas because it is a day of getting together with family and good friends without the stress around gift buying and all of that.

One time, about three or four years ago, I was still feeling the afterglow of Thanksgiving on the Cape when I wrote a column back home in Canada referring to the American Thanksgiving as “the real one” compared to what I went on to call “the bogus one we have here.” As you might imagine, I received a slew of email from upset Canadians who assured me that, in their view anyway, Canada’s Thanksgiving is far more than just another long weekend for teachers and other public sector workers.

One fellow Canadian went so far as to send me a detailed write-up on the origins of Canada’s Thanksgiving and harvest celebration that seemed just as stirring as the American tales about the Pilgrims gathering for their first harvest feast along the shores of Plymouth, Massachusetts. I was so impressed with this letter and some of the others I received that I apologized for my “bogus Thanksgiving” quip. That turkey ain’t ever going to fly again, at least off this keyboard.

So now that I have knocked a little more stuffing out of myself over that one, let me wish all of my fellow Canadians a happy Thanksgiving and thank you for your support of Niagara At Large as an independent news and commentary voice in our greater Niagara region.

Let your friends and associates know about this site. Visit it regularly and send us any news or commentary you may have to drapers@vaxxine.com. In a tidal wave of corporate media chains that place put profits for their shareholders.

(Niagara At Large invites you to share your views on this post. Remember that we only post comments by individuals who also share their first and last names.)