Happy (Canadian) Thanksgiving!

It was great to be back in Canada this year for thanksgiving, and be able to have turkey, gravy, cranberry sauce, the whole shebang shared with family. Thanksgiving in 2013 was on October 14th, so you’ll hear the whole story in a couple of days, but I’d like to share a few details with you today. We invited a big mish-mash of people over to our small apartment for the holiday, at that point we had yet to befriend any other Canadians in the city so we introduced our traditions to our Chinese, British, and American friends (the latter of which seemed very confused as to why we were celebrating in October). We had to improvise on the food because apparently China doesn’t have turkeys (we went with duck) cranberry sauce (found dried cranberries at a foreign food store and attempted to rehydrate them, the results were surprisingly edible), or gravy (we used chicken soup broth which worked fairly well… if you ignored the noodles). Everyone contributed a bit to the food so we gained a random assortment of sides. It was a well cultured meal. Our second year in China we were sent canned cranberry and chicken oxo cubes from our awesome families, so we were able to upgrade in some aspects!

Here’s an interesting article to check out about Canadian Thanksgiving for anyone whose interested. HISTORY: Canadian Origin to Thanksgiving? I’ve heard many versions of who started the holiday and the story surrounding it since I grew curious and looked it up after many office debates with our American colleagues (in 2013). I grew up hearing the story of the pilgrims just like our southern neighbours, but that may have been owed to the fact that three of our four working television stations were American. Anyways I had always assumed that the holiday had started before the continent had been separated and so had been adopted by the North and South, and figured that differences in the time of celebration had more to do with harvest times being earlier in the North and later in the South, but apparently there’s a lot more of a debate going on. Either way those of you celebrating today (or yesterday as my family did) have an extra chunk of turkey for the Canadians overseas that don’t have access to this delicious bird.