The Joy of a Totally Irrelevant Holiday (How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Canadian Thanksgiving)
October 29th, 2022
I am not Canadian. The country means almost nothing to me.
Whilst technically, it’s in the commonwealth and so UK adjacent, there’s still no feeling there. Sorry. On the 10th of October I celebrated my first Thanksgiving. Canadian style. It was awesome.
Only one of our pseudo-maple leaf ragtag bunch was Canadian, rendering the whole affair an homage to a country most of us have absolutely no connection to. But still, we crushed Molson beers (excellent), Donald Sutherlands (technically we made Rusty Nails – Canadian rye was nowhere to be found that day in Amsterdam, so we settled for Bourbon) and watched a 10-year-old hockey game on our friend’s huge television. When we arrived vegetables and tarts flew in and out of ovens, and cutting boards coated the kitchen sides, decorated with mixing bowls of egg wash and sweet potato peelings. I roasted a chicken coated inside and out with copious amounts of salted butter. My boy did not die in vain. He was beautiful.
This culinary chaos didn’t occur in our token Canadian’s kitchen – he wasn’t even our host for the evening, imposing that we commit to this Canadian bit. So why were butter tarts being eaten to a soundtrack of Canadian indie rock no-one gives a shit about? Is it because we are kind and caring friends to our homesick buddy? Nope. Because there are culinary egomaniacs among us that relish a dinner party? Hopefully not. Because when we young people abandon our past traditions, and links to our cultural history, an innate force within us drives us to replace it with a new tradition no matter if it relates to us geographically or not? Deep, but probably misguided.
Did I still nearly cry at everyone’s contribution to that bit of the dinner where you say what you’re thankful for? Yes. I had consumed enough whiskey to become more emotional than usual. Was it still a great meal? Yes. Did it mean something to me? Also, somehow, yes. Have I begun to rely too much on answering my own rhetorical devices? I don’t even understand hockey.
Whilst my eyes struggle to follow a high-speed-ice-bound puck, I still watched with avid fervor, perched on the arm of the couch, engrossed as if it meant something to me. I watch most sports the same way a dog watches television. Even though the bottle’s label revealed to me that our Molson beers were actually so cheap because they were brewed in the UK, I kept this discovery to myself, so as not to break the spell. This is very out of character: I have ruined many situations with a little too much truth for no good reason.
Holidays, even irrelevant ones, are best when they are earnest. Like a sincere pumpkin patch, or a Muppet Christmas. Silly and sincere are not mutually exclusive, and my inaugural Canadian Thanksgiving made this clear – and for that, I am thankful. I’ll be celebrating again in 2023, and hopefully, by that time, we’ll have found some gosh darn Rye in this gosh darn country.
