There it is, Thanksgiving Day! However, the calendar says the same day is also celebrated as Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples’ Day in the United States. That same weekend may also celebrate something else in other cultural communities. In fact, modern calendars seem to include more and more special days and reasons to celebrate.
A map of Columbus’ four voyages to the West look like a weather map of hurricanes spawned by the Atlantic Ocean and which then swept into the Caribbean islands as far as Central America. The map is a historic record of the decades following 1492 and Columbus’ first landfall on this side of the Atlantic. However, there is no indication of any of his travels veering northward to the continent of North America.
And that begs the question. Why would Columbus be celebrated in the U.S. when he never reached its shores?
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It all serves to highlight the fact that the history of our modern Thanksgiving Day is complicated. Depending on who you ask, it has many origins and many reasons for it to be celebrated. In the U.S., Lincoln’s government set its date as the fourth Thursday in November. In Canada, at about the same time, it was decided that Thanksgiving should be celebrated a lot earlier since sporting activities, things which by then had been attached to Thanksgiving, were harder to deal with in the cold month of November. Shovelling snow off fields for an annual festive football game had negative implications — too cold for football, but not yet cold enough for hockey.
Invariably, in whatever country it’s celebrated, and on whatever day, Thanksgiving’s central theme, or raison d’être, has consisted in people coming together as families, friends, and neighbours.
And that’s good enough for most of us.
Let’s eat! Before dinner gets cold.
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Let the historians, or our education systems, sort out and argue about the reasons and origins for it all. Actually, a good article about the topic was “The odd, complicated history of Canadian Thanksgiving,” Maclean’s magazine, Oct. 5, 2017. It’s short enough to read in some quiet corner before falling asleep for a post-Thanksgiving-dinner nap.
There was also something on the calendar about the 10th of September being Grandparents Day. Who knew? But a lot of us would probably get behind something like that.
P.S. The first mention of thanksgiving in the Books of Moses (Leviticus 7:11 ff) links it, appropriately, to peace offerings. It also mentions that nothing should be left until the next day — no leftovers!
Rev. Harry Kleinhuis is a columnist with Metroland Media. His column, Meditations, appears weekly. He can be reached at hskleinhuis@gmail.com.
