Canadian Thanksgiving.

[Lallans]

I'll wish you a happy and festive Thanksgiving now if you'll wish me one next month.
Have a slice of pie for me, would you?

Thanks for the wishes. I already had two slices of particularly good pumpkin pie, one dedicated to you.

Due to people coming from out of town and so on, my extended family celebrated our Thanksgiving yesterday. Part of the fun used to be to try to get the married-in French Canadian members to try pumpkin pie, something that never entered their cuisine, apparently, because they generally regarded it as a degustant form of poison. However, the lines are drawn now and the converts tuck in while the others gag. Anyway, the nice thing about the Canadian form of Thanksgiving holiday is that it's very flexible; you are socially free to celebrate it anyway you want because there's almost no advertising and therefore no pressure- this is great for the people that make it happen (the women).

When I lived in a border era, the big Canuck excitement over US Thanksgiving started when Ronald Regan was president and US frozen turkeys were 19 cents a pound. We would swarm over the border filling up our freezers and consume the US birds on holidays throughout the rest year (because there's a marketing board here, our turkeys are hideously more expensive). And while those very low prices ended with the Regan era, the bargain remains and the tradition continues even though Canada Customs introduced draconian measures to control the flow.