Vox:
Instead of Columbus Day, our northern neighbors spend the second Monday of every October celebrating Canadian Thanksgiving or, as they call it, Thanksgiving. As I wrote last year (what can I say, it’s my holiday tradition), Canadian Thanksgiving is a way better holiday than Columbus Day in every way.
Here’s how the two holidays match up.
Happy Thanksgiving to all my fellow Canadians!
There’s a better reason. Columbus pretty much committed genocide.
Wait…uh, never mind…Happy Halloween/Day of the Dead!
Columbus committed genocide?
Talk about the others who went later, but Columbus? What do you study at history, guys?
Here ya go, for some info on the father of the slave trade…and a lot of other nastiness.
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/columbus_day
Sorry, it’s not Thanksgiving unless you’re going Christmas shopping at Walmart.
American K-12 gets an EXTREMELY sanitized version of the events of 1492+, to the point where you later find out it’s essentially flat wrong.
Neat points:
– He made it to, basically, the Bahamas
– We already knew the earth wasn’t flat when he left
– His contribution to the area was pestilence and slavery
– The continent is actually named after another Italian, Amerigo Vespucci, who actually “found” the mainland later.
How about we celebrate neither? Canadian Thanksgiving is based on a farcical origin story like American Thanksgiving is, They’re both historical events but neither are the real reason why either country celebrates their thanksgivings. They were, historically, irregular holidays established as a celebration that was a general European tradition dating back to Roman times. The U.S. began regularly celebrating the holiday in 1863 and Canada in 1879 with both countries decades later drumming up ridiculous origins of their respective holidays. The American holiday changed dates once, and Canadian Thanksgiving has changed numerous times but was first celebrated either on or around the American one for most of its early history.
If we must have an excuse to close banks and schools in October let’s just do a one day fall festival and celebrate Thanksgiving in November like it originally was. Many American towns near the Canadian border have a fall festival on this day to keep parity and draw Canadian tourists, anyway.
Or we could just celebrate Viking Day to celebrate the real discoverers of America. They were genocidal maniacs, but it’s at least fun to dress up as them and get drunk.
You a better name than “Fall Festival” or even “Harvest Festival” to get businesses to close. But that’s all it is, really. Plus the pretending you’re a pilgrim shooting a turkey with a musket thing, which we could do without.
“we could just celebrate Viking Day to celebrate the real discoverers of America.”
You forgot about those pesky natives…