What if America’s love of Thanksgiving were to equal its love of firearms?

Feast-inspired lobby group works diligently to get more pie and gravy into every home

Back in more innocent times, it was easy to pretend that the only significant difference between the United States and Canada was Thanksgiving.

Ours is in early October. Theirs is in late November. Ours is a polite, quiet, unassuming holiday. It suits our personality. Theirs is a huge, loud and expansive party. It suits their personality.

It’s a bit like guns. They love them way more than we do. Which gets me thinking. What if we looked at guns in terms of Thanksgiving?

In America, you can have as big a Thanksgiving as you want. There are no limits on it. The right to a massive Thanksgiving is likely enshrined in the constitution. That’s how the pro-Thanksgiving lobby justifies the spread of Thanksgiving. The National Thanksgiving Association was created for that purpose. It’s a hugely powerful entity representing turkey farmers and cornucopia manufacturers from coast to coast. The NTA spends millions of dollars pushing its agenda and funding the campaigns of like-minded politicians.

There’s nothing wrong with Thanksgiving, they say. Thanksgiving doesn’t cause harm, it’s the misuse of Thanksgiving that’s the problem. Millions of responsible people have perfectly reasonable Thanksgivings. Do we trample on their rights because a few loose cannons misuse this cherished holiday?

In reality, all common sense has been abandoned on the Thanksgiving issue. It’s become a fight between the left and right. Each side might have legitimate arguments to make, but nobody is listening to anybody anymore.

Now, suppose that Thanksgiving has gotten so out of hand that it’s actually killing people. They’re eating themselves to death. They’re undercooking their turkeys and getting food poisoning. In a society that is less, um, insane, rational leaders would get to work on solving the Thanksgiving problem.

Not so in America.

In fact, rather than being content with the massive, widespread and dangerous proliferation of Thanksgiving, The National Thanksgiving Association is hard at work making Thanksgiving even more pervasive. They want to see gravy boats and cranberry sauce in every home in America. They object to any limit on the size of pumpkin pies. The thinking, bizarre as it sounds, is that everyone will be safer if they all celebrate Thanksgiving to the same extreme.

Various states have their own laws governing Thanksgiving. Rules are more strict in New York and California than they are in places like Nevada where nobody needs a background check and there’s no limit to the number of decorative gourds you can buy. Even so, there are Thanksgiving-related fatalities and injuries in every U.S. state. Most barely make the news anymore and when there’s a particularly awful one, it only seems to raise the bar for the next time, as if there’s a worst-Thanksgiving record just waiting to be broken.

A pattern has thus emerged. Thanksgiving will get out of hand in some city, everyone’s thoughts and prayers will pour forth like a drop of water on a forest fire, and politicians will say “now is not the time to talk about Thanksgiving control.” What they’re doing is hoping that the latest bad one will be the last bad one, and it never is. Their thoughts and prayers are more effective.

We must therefore conclude that America is doomed to repeat the past. There will never be a Thanksgiving tragedy bad enough to force that country to make significant changes. The right to bear Thanksgiving is too important. If Thanksgiving hurts anyone, it’s worth it.

In Canada, on the other hand, Thanksgiving is treated as pretty much any other long weekend. There’s no Thanksgiving culture to speak of. There’s no political force trying to promulgate Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving-related mishaps are rare.

Which country is right? Ours is. Here’s a thought just in time for Thanksgiving: Thank God we’re not them.