I've known about this holiday for a while, and my only Canadian connection was family in Montreal who were American by roots. But can some of our Canadian/Cyburbians enlighten me on Canadian Thanksgiving, the traditions and history of it. Is it similarto American Thanksgiving?
You get all squeezed up inside/Like the days were carved in stone/You get all wired up inside/And it's bad to be alone
You can go out, you can take a ride/And when you get out on your own/You get all smoothed out inside/And it's good to be alone
-Peart
I've been here for a few years, and it's basically the same thing... celebrating the harvest, etc. (obviously our harvest time is earlier up here and thus we celebrate earlier). Usually it's a big time for family get togethers and we have similar foods that we eat. In BME's family, we go around the dinner table and tell each other what we are thankful for (or at least we have in the past)... and that's a little new for me. The tradition of watching college football on that day isn't quite as big up here though.Originally posted by zmanPLAN
As of today, the holiday once called Canadian Thanksgiving (an obsolete term; the Government of Canada calls it "Thanksgiving Canada") is officially 79.52% of an American Thanksgiving. It's in French ("Le Giving de Merci de Canadien") as well as in English. It's also a bit more polite. Donuts are substituted for cranberries. By law, at least 1/3 of the items served as a Thanksgiving dinner must be of Canadian content as defined by Thanksgiving Canada. Instead of watching college football that afternoon, Canadians watch the nation's most anticipated CFL game, the Toque Bowl, in which the Saskatchewan Roughriders and the rival Ottawa Rough Riders traditionally face each other.
EDIT: one other important difference. Unlike our kind and merciful President, who traditionally pardons the presidential Thanksgiving turkey, the cruel Canadian Prime Minister personally hunts down and kills "Gobblin' Gordy." As is also tradition, he bites off its head with his bare teeth.
American Thanksgiving:
Canadian Thanksgiving:
A cruel, barbaric people, those Canadians. Polite and clean, but barbaric..
Growth for growth's sake is the ideology of the cancer cell. -- Edward Abbey
Uhh.... Dan, you may be wrong there...EDIT: one other important difference. Unlike our kind and merciful President, who traditionally pardons the presidential Thanksgiving turkey, the cruel Canadian Prime Minister personally hunts down and kills "Gobblin' Gordy." As is also tradition, he bites off its head with his bare teeth.
I think Gordy is spelled Gordie....
You get all squeezed up inside/Like the days were carved in stone/You get all wired up inside/And it's bad to be alone
You can go out, you can take a ride/And when you get out on your own/You get all smoothed out inside/And it's good to be alone
-Peart
I don't know how the US has managed to avoid being taken over by those gun toting, right wing Canadian meanies.....Think about it......they could just take over whenever they want.....looks like they took thanksgiving away already, what's next....our Bill of Rights? Constitution? Ha ha ha ha ha ha....
Do they eat Turkey in Canada or Moose?
On the ground, protecting the Cyburbia Shove since 2004.
Here is the typical menu at my parent's. Thanksgiving is the biggest holiday of the year for my family.
1) turkey - usually a fresh one from a neighbour
2) stuffing - rye bread with caraway seeds, celery, home made chicken stock or turkey stock, rosemary
3) Vegetables - baked yams with a brown sugar sauce, cauliflower and brocolli in cheese sauce, mashed potatoes, carrots, peas
4) Condiments - homemade pickles of various types, typically from the garden(beans, beets, cukes), homemade wild cranberry sauce (from the bog across the street), gravy, pickled crab apples
5) Pies, all from own trees / bushes - raspberry, blueberry, apple and of course pumpkin (sometimes from own garden).
6) Home canned moose meat has been known to be served also.
Now I am home sick, this weekend, if I go out for dinner I have the homemade cranberry sauce to take with me
Last edited by donk; 08 Oct 2004 at 1:35 PM.
Too lazy to beat myself up for being to lazy to beat myself up for being too lazy to... well you get the point....
Depends on what we hit with our cars on the way home from work.
Traditionally we have turkey, but I have actually cooked moose for dinner since I've been living here (goulash) so it's not uncommon.
Thank you DONK for giving me a true response, instead of miking fun of it. I was really curious. Although a few jabs northward are good too.
You get all squeezed up inside/Like the days were carved in stone/You get all wired up inside/And it's bad to be alone
You can go out, you can take a ride/And when you get out on your own/You get all smoothed out inside/And it's good to be alone
-Peart
Hey... I gave you a true response! I guess since I'm really an American I'm just chopped liver though.
Did you not get the memo, chopped liver is for saint jean de baptiste day.Hey... I gave you a true response! I guess since I'm really an American I'm just chopped liver though.
You are going to fail your citizenship test with responses like that.
As for moose, I hate the stuff. My step father cans it for the neighbours and it stinks their house out for a month afterwards.
Too lazy to beat myself up for being to lazy to beat myself up for being too lazy to... well you get the point....
Hehehe... I don't think I would mind eating it, if I didn't have to clean some of the hair and stuff out of the meat first. As a city girl (c'mon, think of what wildlife I had to deal with growing up in Los Angeles!), picking hairs out of the moose meat almost made me wretch. The actual moose goulash I made tasted pretty good... unfortunately though I just couldn't get the thought of the big long hairs out of my mind when I was eating it though.
And thanks for the tip... now I know when to eat that chopped liver!
Off-topic:
I don't recall ever having eaten moose (maybe had moose sausage once when I was a kid), but I have killed one.
And it wasn't with a gun.
Thanksgiving has taken on much more meaning since I met Mrs. Tranplanner. My parents are immigrants so we never had large Thanksgiving dinners, and there was no family tradition behind it. Mrs. Tranplanner comes from a large French-Canadian family, and Thanksgiving is one of the big get-togethers of the year. I looove the big turkey dinners that come with that. Two things differentiating U.S. and Canadian Thanksgivings - no football (well, the CFL tries but it's not the same), and no sales.
Oh, and NHPlanner - I got two words for you: ground-meat stuffing. Boo-yah!
You are all wrong - real Canadians know the purpose of Thanksgiving is to celebrate the bounty of our harvest and give thanks that it is at this time of year that we put the elderly on northerly ice flows so that the young may survive for another year.
Thanks to you too Nerudite, I apologize for that.
As for the CFL, we've started getting a friday night game from TSN down here in Colorado on our fledgling satellite sports network, Altitude. They are having trouble filling the time with no NHL and the NBA has not begun yet. The CFL seems cool, but it is just a little different. Interesting to watch though.
Does the NFL get shown in the Great White North?
You get all squeezed up inside/Like the days were carved in stone/You get all wired up inside/And it's bad to be alone
You can go out, you can take a ride/And when you get out on your own/You get all smoothed out inside/And it's good to be alone
-Peart
No biggie... I was just being poopy because it's what I do best.
Off-topic:
TSN (cable) shows the sunday night game. As above, no different than the american coverage, except for the comemrcials.
The good thing is that depending on the global affilaite you can sometimes end up with a choice of games on teh 2 american stations and a different one on global. The bad news is that we don't get the ads during the superbowl.
For me footbal watching season does not start until after cycling season ends, ussually in november.
Too lazy to beat myself up for being to lazy to beat myself up for being too lazy to... well you get the point....
Thanks Donk, I have always wondered about that.
You get all squeezed up inside/Like the days were carved in stone/You get all wired up inside/And it's bad to be alone
You can go out, you can take a ride/And when you get out on your own/You get all smoothed out inside/And it's good to be alone
-Peart
Read an article in the paper today...I don't think it's online anywhere. Anyhoo - Canadian Thanksgiving is actually older than American Thanksgiving and was first celebrated by early French explorers and colonists in Quebec. The actually date of Thanksgiving has moved around quite a bit, and sometimes changed from year to year based on the whim of the government - one year it was held in April to celebrate the recovery of King Edward VII from a serious illness. In the 1920s, the date was fixed to that of Remembrance Day (November 11), to give thanks for the end of WWI. In the 1950s, the government of the day finally fixed the date as being the second Monday in October. I'm not sure anyone knows why.
Transplanner, that's an interesting story! I had always wonder why it's this time of the year...previously, I had thought that it was a way to make the weekend even more special since it's my birthday today!
And, it's totally cool that Canada's Thanksgiving is older than the American...wowie. Who would have known that considering USA is older than Canada?!
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