Take a Thanksgiving lesson from our neighbors up north, eh?
We could learn a thing or two about Thanksgiving from our friends in Canada.
First, the timing.
Canadians observe their traditional communal feast to celebrate “the bountiful harvest” on the second Monday in October, a date that not only better coincides with the conclusion of the harvest season but also neatly spaces out the major family holidays at the end of the year.
American Thanksgiving — observed on the fourth Thursday of November — is absurdly close to Christmas. It’s also at a time of year in the Midwest when travel conditions are dicey and the natural vista is of denuded trees that bespeak death, not nature’s fertile cornucopia.
Canadian Thanksgiving is also closer than American Thanksgiving to the estimated date of the Pilgrims’ famous 1621 throwdown at the
Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts. That event, which included European settlers and Indigenous guests, occurred somewhere around the end of September.
Canada dates the kick-starting of its annual celebration to an “Order of Good Cheer” feast in mid-November 1606, though both Canadian and American Thanksgivings have their roots in far older post-harvest traditional revelry in the old and new worlds. Canada’s bounced around the calendar until 1957 when it was fixed at the ideal date.
Second, the danger.
As in America, Thanksgiving in Canada is a time when extended families gather, chow down on turkey and watch special football games. Therefore, government officials, wary of the spread of COVID-19, cautioned against customary observances in advance of this year’s holiday.
“We’re on the brink of a fall that could be much worse than the spring,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warned in a Sept. 23 speech. “It’s all too likely we won’t be gathering for Thanksgiving, but we still have a shot at Christmas.”
“This is not the time for large gatherings,” said Dr. Deena Hinshaw, Alberta’s chief medical health officer, noting the already precipitous rise in novel coronavirus infections.
Canadian epidemiologists cautioned against relying on test results and against merging “bubbles” of households that had been safely isolating together. In most cases, the “bubble” is an illusion, a barrier that’s broken many times a week through contact with outsiders and becomes a false comfort.
“Please limit your Thanksgiving dinner to the people you live with,” said Dr. Eileen de Villa, Toronto’s medical officer of health. “If you live alone, your safest option is to join with others virtually.”
Sound familiar?
U.S. government and public health officials have been issuing similar warnings and advisories in advance of our Thanksgiving a week from Thursday, admonitions made even more urgent by the likelihood that temperatures will not be conducive to safer outdoor dining. (Chicago’s average high on Nov. 26 is 43 degrees.)
Yet many Americans are blithe and stubborn — an Ohio State University Medical Center survey recently found that “nearly two in five report they will likely attend a gathering with more than 10 people, and a third will not ask guests to wear masks.”
Monday, Ohio Republican U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan spoke for the defiant when he tweeted, “Today your freedom to go to church, to go to work, to go to school, to have friends in your home, to leave your home, to dance at your daughter’s wedding (and) to celebrate Christmas and Thanksgiving is being taken away (by the) government.”
Anecdotally, it seems a significant number of Canadians felt the same. Because statistically the nation saw a 141% increase in the rolling seven-day average of new COVID-19 cases between its Thanksgiving and Monday.
“Many of the cases that we are seeing now are the result of spread over Thanksgiving when families gathered together,” Dr. Hinshaw told Canadian TV.
The Washington Post reports that “provincial and federal officials have pointed to the holiday as a culprit in the spike” since the known incubation period of the pandemic disease lines up with the increase in cases. Dr. Matthew Oughton, infectious disease specialist at Montreal’s McGill University, told Time magazine that in weeks when new “lockdown measures should have been bringing things down, it was actually Thanksgiving pushing those numbers back up.”
To respond to Jordan and others who are whining these days, it’s not government that’s taking away your freedom. It’s a highly contagious virus that’s often spread by people too shortsighted and self-interested to make the necessary sacrifices that will hasten the return of those freedoms.
Emerging vaccines offer the promise that we’ll be able to do it up right a year from now, but health care personnel, essential workers and others whom big family gatherings ultimately put at risk are begging you: Dial it back. Hope for a shot at Christmas. Heed the cautionary tale from Canada.