"Gregory Morrow" >
wrote in link.net:

> Michel Boucher wrote:
>
>> But your Thanksgiving was originally a harvest festival.
>
> But ISTR that the US Thanksgiving was largely an "invented"
> holiday, not much more than 100 years old (if that). It being the
> US, I'm sure there were some mercantile elements that came into
> the decision to establish the holiday ;-)

Of course there was. I didn't mean to say that it WAS a harvest
festival, only that an original Thanksgiving was at one time a
harvest festival. The practice of Thanksgiving was brought here by
loyalists who fled the depredation of the Revolting which affected
the US for a time. This is why it is of little interest to French-
Canadians and until recently was in fact used by the Church as an
unofficial holiday, like Labour Day, where people would go spend the
day in church. Well...it kept them off the streets...

The reason the Canadian Thanksgiving is earlier is because it was
ostensibly made to coincide with the earlier (to New England) harvest
and in fact the 1957 act of Parliament which instituted it as a
statutory holiday (rather than relying on the former practice of
successive Royal Proclamations) specifically said it was to be "a day
of general thanksgiving to almighty God for the bountiful harvest
with which Canada has been blessed."

http://www.web-holidays.com/canada/

http://www.thanksgiving-traditions.com/html/canada.html

http://www.pch.gc.ca/progs/cpsc-ccsp...a/action_e.cfm

There is no gift-buying holiday associated with Thanksgiving in
Canada. Today I am going wargaming at a friend's house.

Our smarmy, dysfunctional family reunion holiday is Christmas.

--

"It is easier for a rich man to enter heaven seated
comfortably on the back of a camel, than it is for
a poor man to pass through the eye of a needle."

Supply Side Jesus