The lore of the feast

Well, the leaves are turning, the harvest is mostly in and Canadians are ready for the first long weekend of the post-summer vacation season.

It's time for that good-old fashioned Canadian tradition of Thanksgiving, a national holiday observed on the second Monday of October since way back in 1957.

That's right. The second Monday of October was proclaimed "a day of general Thanksgiving to Almighty God for the bountiful harvest with which Canada has been blessed" just 52 years ago.

While it may be a relatively new fixed-date holiday, some form of Thanksgiving celebration and day off work has been observed in this country since long before European colonization.

The timing of Thanksgiving early autumn coincides with harvest festivals celebrated in Europe and by First Nations across North America for generations.

When we think of the traditions of Thanksgiving, we tend to refer to those American images of Pilgrims, Plymouth Rock and the Mayflower. However, Thanksgiving does have uniquely Canadian roots and was likely celebrated in what would become Canada before it was observed in what would become the United States.

Thanksgiving for safe passage

The English explorer Martin Frobisher was so grateful that he returned safely from a search for the Northwest Passage through Canada's Arctic to Asia that he held a formal ceremony in present-day Newfoundland and Labrador in 1578, giving thanks for surviving the journey.

That was 43 years before the Pilgrims marked their appreciation for a bountiful harvest by sharing a dinner with their native neighbours down the coast from where modern-day Boston would sprout. There's some debate over whether turkey was included in that Thanksgiving dinner. The likely menu would have included smoked fowl, venison, seafood, nuts, berries and fruit.

The celebration was brought to Nova Scotia in the 1750s and after the Seven Years' War ended in 1763, the citizens of Halifax marked the occasion with a day of Thanksgiving.

After the American Revolution, loyalists who left the United States for Canada brought their Thanksgiving traditions to other parts of the country. Those traditions likely included turkey, which had been the focus of Benjamin Franklin's campaign for a national bird. Norman Rockwell would later solidify the big bird's place on the Thanksgiving dinner table with a series of paintings in the early 20th century. The best-known titled Freedom from Want depicted a family gathered around a dinner table eagerly anticipating a perfectly cooked turkey.

Thanksgiving became a national holiday in 1879 when Parliament declared Nov. 6 as a day of Thanksgiving. But the date was not fixed, and it shifted normally between October and November.

After the First World War, Thanksgiving and Armistice Day were celebrated on the same day the Monday of the week during which Nov. 11 fell.

In 1931, the two holidays were separated, and Armistice Day was renamed Remembrance Day. Thanksgiving was shifted to the second Monday of October, although it was not officially fixed to that day until Parliament put it in writing in 1957.

The setting of Thanksgiving on the second Monday of October was not without controversy. The day was supposed to mark a bountiful harvest celebrate the fruit of the Canadian farmer's labour.

But the harvest usually isn't all quite in by modern Thanksgiving Day. That led E. C. Drury, a life-long farmer and former premier of Ontario, to complain that the towns had stolen a farmers' holiday to give people a long weekend while the weather is still relatively good.

While Thanksgiving is marked across the country, it's not a statutory holiday in New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia. In those provinces, your employer doesn't have to pay you to stay home, stuff your face and watch the annual Canadian Football League Thanksgiving Day Classic doubleheader although most do.