In Canada, today is Thanksgiving Day. More than just another superfluous day off from work, Thanksgiving is a precious time of sharing, spending time with one’s family, and of course indulging in the ritual of the turkey. Every family, of course, has subtle variations in how they practice Thanksgiving, and in the spirit of sharing, I’d like to describe the traditional Canadian Thanksgiving Day observances in my family.
In the early morning, people start arriving on their snowmobiles, eagerly anticipating the evening feast, but even as they arrive, there’s a sense of expectancy in the air. Everyone is waiting for father, who usually returns home around midday with the bird. Like our neighbors in the US, we too enjoy turkey on Thanksgiving, but we prefer to eat the local variety of Canadian wild arctic white turkey. They’re a little fattier than regular turkeys and taste like goose or duck.
Anyway, father pulls his snowmobile right up to family home with the great white bird in tow. Because it’s so extremely large, we usually run the turkey behind the snowmobile from the trapline back home. Then comes time to prepare the bird.
We begin by herding it into the largest of our igloos, which by this time has a larger hole cut in the side to pass the giant turkey. Despite the frozen building materials, the fire pit keeps the igloo’s interior reasonably warm. All of the menfolk then strip down to our loincloths and begin to walk slowly around the turkey while reciting passages from our favourite Farley Mowatt novels, which slowly but surely confuses it into a trance state. That’s when the action begins: we bash the turkey repeatedly over the head with frozen badgers until it has expired. In the past, Canadians often used barbarous techniques to subdue the animal, but they have recently been outlawed on humane grounds.
Now that the turkey is dead, father opens the ceremonial case of Molson Canadian and empties all twelve down the turkey’s throat for flavour. The remaning twenty ceremonial cases are reserved for the part of the ceremony known as the “piss-up”, in which the men call each other “hosers” and armwrestle in the snow. By this time, one or two red-coated mounties often stand guard at the perimiter of the village, in case we attract unwanted attention from a passing polar bear. If that happens, the mounties will wrestle the polar bear into submission using nothing but polite but firm apologies.
After that, several hours slip away while the womenfolk wrap the turkey in strips of damp cedar bark, bury it in the fire pit, and let it cook slowly while chanting the latest Celine Dion hits. This is what I hear, anyway, since the men aren’t allowed near the fire pit once the turkey is dead. Whatever culinary magic happens in that pit, the result is the most amazing meal one could ever hope to enjoy. Next to the warmth the firepit, we tear juicy chunks of flesh off the bird with our teeth, and smother it liberally with delicious maple syrup and gallons of poutine.
As the evening wears on and the turkey is stripped to the bones, people become sluggish and torpid, and are prone to reciting Gordon Lightfoot lyrics. We then fall to playing the “I spy” game under warm Hudson’s Bay Company blankets. “I spy” usually puts us all to sleep in the end, because when you live in the snow, pretty much everything you spy is white.
They say that, once we get electricity and running water here in Canada, things will change. They say that we’ll cook the turkey in an electric oven, for example, and the turkey will have to be an American one in order to fit it inside. I don’t like the thought of these changes. I hope that, if change comes, we hold onto the traditial Canadian values that we were raised with. While Canadian Thanksgiving lasts, I for one will enjoy every morsel of turkey poutine, savour every sip of beer, and linger on every reminiscence of the adventures of Bob and Doug around the warm glow of our fire pit. In that spirit, I say to all from the bottom of my heart, G’day, eh.