Thanksgiving, Halloween and the mask off state neutrality
Thanksgiving - Canadian Thanksgiving - is upon us, getting a head start on our American cousins by a month. Americans celebrate an apocryphal pot luck dinner shared by freshoff-the-boat religious fanatics and the wary original inhabitants. One could make the argument that Samuel de Champlain’s Ordre de Bon Temps feasts, where natives, bringing tasty game, were welcome guests, would be a rough equivalent of the tradition that inspired the U.S. holiday.
Canadians don’t really know what they celebrate except a vague nod to the bounty of the land as it hardens and freezes for the long winter. Hence, Thanksgiving in Canada, if I am permitted to quote myself, is a holiday in search of a myth.
In Quebec, though, as newcomers come to discover, Thanksgiving - l'action de grâce - is pretty much just a long weekend conveniently timed for shuttering the chalet or shivering on the football field sidelines before the snow sets in. It’s also the prelude to what has become a bona fide de facto holiday in Quebec - Halloween.
Whereas one will be hard-pressed to find much Thanksgiving commercial promotion in Quebec - maybe a bale of straw and a pile of pumpkins outside a store - Halloween is hyped to the hilt. Big retailers start moving Halloween costumes onto the floor at the end of August, with skeletons and jack o’lanterns competing for shelf space with back-toschool supplies. Grocery and drugstore shelves are piled high with a cornucopia of candy and treats weeks in advance of Oct. 31.
The popularity of Halloween in Quebec, according to prevailing theories of social anthropology, can be traced to the rapid secularization of the province over the past 50 odd years. Since its founding by Champlain 409 years ago, the Roman Catholic church has dominated life in Quebec, running hospitals, schools and social services, and having a powerful influence on politics.
Starting in the 1960s, though, the state stripped the church of its omnipresent status and, thus liberated from the grip of the bishops, Quebecers abandoned their church-going habits with stunning haste.
Into the vacuum of spirituality, say the sociologists, slipped the hocuspocus, ghoul-fearing, pagan-worshiping Halloween celebration. All that residual dread of the wages of sin and the fires of hell bred into Quebecers over the centuries has found sustenance in the trappings of Halloween.
There is a certain subtle irony in the fascination with resurrectional entities like zombies, vampires and ghosts, at a time when Quebec has been engaged in a prolonged debate over state secularism. That debate was brought to world attention 10 years ago by the Herouxville horror show, whereby the tiny town in the Mauricie adopted a behavioural code for its essentially non-existent immigrant population. Stoning of women, for example, was frowned upon.
The Liberal government of Philippe Couillard is now carrying the secular torch with Bill 62, which would make it illegal to receive or give government service with the face covered. The bill is a much watered-down version of the previous Parti Quebecois government’s much-vilified Charter of Values, with its ban on “ostentatious” religious accoutrements.
Last week, the National Assembly committee examining the bill wrapped up hearings. Both opposition parties denounced the legislation saying it does not go far enough in the cause of state neutrality. Nevertheless, a motion from Quebec Solidaire’s Gabriel Nadeaudubois to remove the crucifix from the National Assembly’s Salon Bleu was handily defeated.
Still, one shudders to imagine how much time and expense has gone into a piece of legislation that is likely to affect a scarcely measurable percentage of the population. And one also wonders now neutral is the state when its lawmakers target one specific religious group.
The bill comes with the backdrop of the increased visibility of anti-immigrant groups in Quebec, one such faction marching to the border last weekend to protest the arrival of desperate people seeking a better life in a new land.
As those folks so inclined carve the Thanksgiving turkey, they may say grace and give thanks for living in a land of tolerance, and accommodation, whatever that in fact, or in deed, means.