Man, it’s already fall. The leaves are turning the colour of 70s living room décor, and I can see my breath inside my bedroom. Unlike summer, which announced itself two months in advance with flirtatious giggles, October just showed up out of nowhere, like a light-brown portable in the middle of your frisbee field. Before I knew it, I was already packing my bags and heading off to eat turkey and celebrate Thanksgiving. Canadian Thanksgiving, that is. There’s a difference. Unlike Americans, we Canadians actually know the history of our holiday, and flaunt it with yearly pageants and historical re-enactments.

As most Canadians know, the first-ever Thanksgiving dinner took place on October 9, 1823, exactly one year after Captain Louie Riel and his fleet first went ashore on the sandy beaches of Dieppe, Nova Scotia. The feast consisted of roast turkey, mashed potatoes, fresh Atlantic salmon, and poutine, and was enjoyed not only by the colonists, but also by the convicts they had transported for imprisonment on PEI. This day also marked the opening of the Canadian Pacific Railway, which was completed in only one month by Prime Minister John Howard and his crew of hard-working Iroquois natives. Thanksgiving is also a time to celebrate the birthday of the famous military general Pierre Trudeau, who led his rag-tag team of settlers to beat Manchester United on the Plains of Abraham in 1812.

This year, I celebrated Trudeau’s birthday in Lethbridge, which is definitely one of the most Canadian cities available in the country. They have a highway called “Whoop-up Drive,” and a whole suburb called “Indian Battle Heights.” When I was walking past Chippewa Crescent on the weekend, I came across a discarded pay-stub belonging to a guy named “Kirby Many Fingers.” It occurred to me that the best thing about Canada may just be the crazy names we’ve inherited, thanks to our innovative native culture. It got me thinking…just how many fingers does Kirby have? The man’s gotta have more than just your standard ten fingers to earn a name like that. And if he had, say, specifically 15 fingers, they’d call him “Kirby Fifteen Fingers,” because of the alliteration. But if he had, like, 62 fingers, they’d just call him “Kirby Enormous Freaky Hands.”

Where was I? Oh yeah…Thanksgiving in Lethbridge. It was a bit of a shock when it came time to leave for the weekend. October, with its girl-guide-knocking-at-my-door tactics, always catches me when I’m totally not prepared. There I was, enjoying my feelings of being totally overwhelmed and completely stressed out, ready to spend the long weekend wallowing in textbooks and self-pity. What do I do instead? Skip town to eat turkey. How am I supposed to get burnt out if this holiday keeps interfering with my blind, feverish pursuit of fulfillment through grades?

So far this semester, I’ve fallen asleep in class at least eight times, stayed up past 4:00 am three times to get different assignments done, and even spent a couple weeks under the influence of the common cold. No all-nighters yet, but I’ve come close. Admittedly, it could be worse…but that was only September. I think that maybe Canadian Thanksgiving is a special reminder to students – even our American friends – that sometimes it’s important to distance yourself from the haze of school in order to make like Kirby, and use your many fingers to count your many blessings. If we keep on blindly blazing forward without taking time to look around or back, we’ll only end up with our hearts and minds more tangled than the history of Canadian Thanksgiving.

by Kevan Gilbert