I'm not sure I get your 1580 reference. If you mean to imply the origins of Thanksgiving aren't in North America, we're saying the same thing, or at least the one social history book I have which covers this says so, that the tradition for communities to hold thanksgivings for reapings and other occasions came from regions of England, then entered New France through British Loyalists who fled the US. That kind of suggests the tradition wasn't one associated to Puritans, which could explain why it took time to emerge in the US devoid of any royalist connotation (but I'm really doing what I shouldn't do... speculation without going back to historical sources). Details about the English origins are no more precise than this in my source alas, it's a social history of New France/Lower Canada/Québec. The fact it's associated to the protestant royalists (it's their communities who celebrated it in the Lower Canada days, not the Canadians - a term which at the time still referred only to the French) explains why here it's never been an important holiday and still isn't (if it wasn't federal, we wouldn't have it). I know of a French tradition of thanksgiving, but it's really different as those feastdays were proclaimed by the King for specific events/reasons, and came with a special church celebration (Te Deum).



Indeed. Québécois (if you allow me the anachronistic denomination) were never too keen royalists either. At first, the people of French descent could not even hold an office without officially forsaking Catholicism (and this even if the population was almost exclusively catholic). It's only thanks indirectly to the US the Crown relented as they were afraid the catholics would rebel and join the USA. Another measure was to grant the two parts of Canada a parliament-for-show (all the executive power and money remained with the British Governor who was part of the merchant oligarchy and served only their interests...), which eventually lead to the Rebellions and the attempt to establish a republic with a constitution on the American model (but even more progressive). It failed for various reasons - the sheer numbers of soldiers the British had here for one, the betrayal of the catholic High Clergy who sided with the King, to the Crown managing to pressure Van Muren into lifting the permission the US had granted our rebel armies like to use their territory as sanctuary and to prepare the invasion.

In any case, the High Clergy always played a complex game, inciting the people into submission to the King on the one hand while working underhand to keep us well away from the Protestants and anything protestant (and thus, in the countryside and poor). By 1957, things had changed a lot, though. The High Clergy was now behind the catholic and reactionary provincial government and against the more liberal protestant Federal one. Thanksgiving was thus for us only a federal holiday (it must be very different in other parts of Canada). The Church favorized the emergence of a very conservative French elite it educated itself, and though it still disapproved of the too liberal (how perceptions change!) American catholic bishops, Communism was then seen as the far more dangerous common enemy (same as in America) and we started to tend more and more toward American values. A generation later a deep social movement made it swing back to social-democrat values and secularism, throwing surprisingly fast the CC out of public life and politics, out of the school system, out of hospitals. This system they put in place got eroded more and more, neoliberalism has more or less imposed its views and reforms but... well, we'll see. The socio-economic center-left (not much center by American standards, not much left by European ones) has been largely asleep since the late 80s, but for 15 weeks or so we've been thrown into what has started as a student strike and has turned into a much wider and fast evolving social crisis, but it's a mess that feeds on so many things at once it's near impossible to step back and figure out what's the real picture and where's it's truly going. It's a big mix of watching the problems elsewhere where higher education fees have skyrocketed, to the social movements in Spain, Greece's problems, a few elements of inspiration from the Arab Spring (mostly social medias's role - no one here is deluded that our situation is anywhere comparable to the Arab countries, the ill-coined name of Maple Spring notwhistanding), Occupy ideas, general disgruntlement with a very exhausted neoliberal governement reaching 70% of dissatisfaction, disgruntlement with the federal Conservatives, a huge frustration with insanely high taxes and a huge debt while our services are cut left and right each year while the governement keep selling our massive natural resources (worth far more than the debt) to private interests for ridiculous prices, and a new law, repressive for sure, meant to put an end to the student strike - but perhaps inconstitutional (let's say it sure put a toe on civil rights, but hardly a whole foot or even close. Similar laws exist in several American cities, but the big difference is that those laws were never implemented there to change the rules in the middle of a social crisis, thus the perception of an attack on freedom of opinion/association). Far from quieting things down, that law rather widened overnight the student conflict to the general population, and in a rather timid way, it's starting to cause ripples in the Canadian left. It's really weird everything that feeds the crisis (or emerge from it), even US-centric issues that have had little or only indirect effects here, for instance people bring up the banks' bail-outs, the millions of Americans who lost their homes, the bad healthcare reform etc. Lots of quotes of JFK floating around lately. Tonight hundreds of lawyers (the Bar is rather conservative) are planning to leave the Montréal's criminal court in full regalia to walk to join the equivalent of your Occupy (more or less) in (legal, about the only legal one happening lately!) protest of the special Law they deem arbitratry and inconstitutional - nothing like that ever happened before. Cops don't join, their deontology code forbids it, but so far they don't apply the law either. They've been tons of arrests, but they skirt around the issue using criminal or city laws instead. In fact, after they mass arrested 500 people one night and the next night the protests had doubled in attendance, they now make only targeted arrests, 1 to 5 max a night.

It's really fascinating to observe all this anyway (I guess given a previous exchange about SOPA, you wouldn't agree "fascinating" is the word: Anonymous has openly joined the side of the protesters and shuts down government, police, city websites one after another. Websites only, for now. Having Anynomous videos all over the media is kind of surreal, the fact they are cheered perhaps even more).



Through Canada, almost certainly, in Québec no, because the church never co-opted that one.

For practicing catholics, nearly all celebrations have a religious aspect, so it takes more than a prayer of thanskgiving to make a civic feastday a religious one.



Yes and no Joel. Nothing is ever static. For many centuries our ancestors have lived in a world were barely any feastday or celebration was devoid of religious aspects. That's especially true for Catholics. That article you link to about Christmas overlooked one very important aspect. It takes seriously the "savant calculations", as if it was an happy coincidence that they arrived at the winter solstice as Christ's birthday (and that it just happened to fall when there wasn't a big Roman festival). It tries to detach the early church, and the writers of the gospels, completely from the "mentality" of paganism, when Matthew especially has very strong mythological elements and sensibility, especially about Christ's birth and infancy. As if these saw religion and symbolism the way modern, post-Rationalism christians do. A great deal of scholars would disagree with that, pointing out that to people of that time, it wasn't conceivable that something as important of a god's birth could happen at a time of the year that wasn't astronomically significant, surely God would have seen to that. The cynics would tell you it was all bad faith and intentional manipulation from the Church, this absorption of pagan feastdays etc., but from all I've read, the truth would be more that the early and medieval Church denied the pagan gods and beliefs, but beliefs in the importance of astrological phenomenons, and their symbolic nature, was still part of the mentality. They did not sanctify a spring with a saint merely to eradicate the pagan beliefs attached to it, they did it in good faith: that power existed but had to come from the Christian God (yes, down the line it became more manipulative, there's plenty of invented saints who are local deities in disguise and all, but not at first). It's not coincidence Christmas was set at the time of the year when daylight starts to grow again (no more than it's a coincidence the Imperial power instituted a rival solar festival later) - the early church still had the mentality and sensibility for such symbolism (the other big mistake is thinking that the other religions were all "primitive" and devoid of complex metaphysics). The bible and the gospels (esp. Matthew) are rife with mythological elements and symbolism - the very same ones found in many mythologies - garden of eden, flood, virgin birth, guiding star, etc., only the christian literalists are still blind to that (and IMO it's largely because christian culture has so long and harshly rejected older cults that it's blinded itself for a long time to their common elements, perceives that admitting to the presence of mythological elements would undermine or invalidate the Christian doctrine, as if the real revolution of christianity wasn't in Christ's message itself). The catholic church has always got a much greater sensibility for the importance of symbols and rituals, but nowadays in the more progressive parishes, you'd see priests far keener on explaining the symbolism and how it fits with Christ's message (they never say out loud "it's just symbolic", though) than merely reading the texts or presenting literal interpretations.

In many ways, some societies have entered a post-christian era, where the place of religion is at least far more in the personal/private realm than the public one (far more so than it the US. Even a political leader referring to his personal beliefs or uttering "God Bless Canada" would be badly perceived by a large part of the nation, and when a US president do it it's perceived negatively here). But those societies all originate from centuries of christian tradition and heritage, and not only that but many of the feastdays are rooted in older practices, and often correspond to times of the year that were always meaningful to humans. As much as Christianity has declined in many places (at least in civic life), people wouldn't just stand for rejections of feastdays that have always carried more meaning or associated traditions that just with religion. And waning of some christian practices doesn't equal antagonism toward them. Even here antagonism is far more against the clergy or church hierarchy than it ever was about the beliefs. In other times fervor would have been strong enough to create a protestant church, but this happened to late and people just deserted the Church, became non denominational or simply lapsed. Many are atheists, but there's never been any militant current, just a push toward secularims. So the feastdays remain, it's just that their religious meaning evaporates slowly or fast. The feastdays that have vanished are the religious one not recognized as holidays by the government (we probably would have had as many as Scandinavia even today if Catholicims had ever been encouraged rather than just tolerated in Canada). At the moment, they're not replaced by anything else, so the christian names remain. No one considers replacing Christmas, like for instance Québec has replaced the Canadian federal holiday celebrating Queen Victoria by a feastday celebrating the Patriots of the 1837-38 rebellion.



Not sure what you mean by your comment about Lent. Aside from old fashioned christians, there's only the "New Age" health trend of using that time of the year to fast to clean out toxins before spring . It's all a christianization of that period of the year leading to Easter and the rebirth of nature, when resources became really scarce and only the return of spring would remedy that. It's again no coincidence the feast associated with the central mystery and message of Christianity, resurection, was celebrated with the return of spring. Carnival, mardi-gras etc. pre-date christianity. It's also a period of fast or restrictions in pre-christian cultures, often not by choice (especially not in northern nations). Mardi-gras is but a last big feast before the hard month of scarcity before hens lay eggs again, cow produced milk, baby animals got born, veggies returned etc. Lent is just a christian integration, adding deeper layers of meanings, of that reality everyone lived with before the modern refrigerator! There wasn't another period of the year that resonated nearly as profoundly and symbolically with Resurrection.

Those things are more deeply ingrained in human nature than most realize, it's really not suprising it naturally found its way into our religious practices, that religions merely sought to ritualize them more and give them deeper meaning still. I've seen another manifestation of that with the recent protests around here. They are inspired by Chilean's protests - an historian suggested people should do that on Twitter (it's mild civil disobedience) and within days people in their thousands were doing it and it keeps growing each night, yet over the days they've naturally morphed into very ancient patterns of symbolic inversions of social structures in order to mock and protest authorities - the very same patterns you see in medieval carnivals, like old grandmas following the lead of young children - and I'm sure 99% of participants don't even realize this (and it's that kind of things that came to frighten the Church in the middle-Ages). And it took historians to point out a few days later that such charivaris, with people coming out of their homes and making tons of noise with pans and such, used to be the most widespread form of pacific protest against the English authorities through the Lower Canada era, especially strong during the 1837-38 rebellions (not against anglophones who were also among the Patriots, no more than the current protest is in any way against Canada, and that's kind of new here) We didn't even know that, yet we returned to the practice thinking it was something new and foreign. Sure, rationally it returned via Chili and a history teacher, but it felt oddly natural The Right of course finds all this stupid, noisy, and childish, pointless and annoying, but they miss the point it what it's supposed to be.



Sure, though like I said, I think you overlook a bit too much the anthropolical aspects, and the weight of traditions. People have attached all kind of other aspects to many of those feastdays - your thanksgiving traditionally bring families together for instance. It's not a denial that for long those feasts had religious aspects, or strong religious meaning, it's just that this meaning is waning, just like pagan/antique meanings have waned rather than disappeared overnight as Christian culture gained strenght.



Ah but yes, it does. I'm pretty sure you need to be non-religious to fully understand how it changes an holiday's nature, though. I'm sure a christian can understand it rationally, but not really experience it. For example, Christmas has a lot of meaning in our family, just not connected anymore to Christian concepts (though a lot of my values and ethics are Christian), but it's much more than merely "having fun" together. The time of the year influences that, if not in a pagan/deist way. I don't know honestly if that owes more to growing older or if it's removing all the christian symbolism that eventually made the rest more obvious/present again.