Thanksgiving, or Thanksgiving Day, occurring on the second Monday in October, is an annual Canadian holiday which celebrates the harvest and other blessings of the past year. On Thursday, January 31, 1957, the Parliament of Canada proclaimed: A Day of General Thanksgiving to Almighty God for the bountiful harvest with which Canada has been blessed – to be observed on the 2nd Monday in October. Thanksgiving is a statutory holiday in most jurisdictions of Canada, with the exceptions being the Atlantic provinces of Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia, where it is an optional holiday. As a liturgical festival, Thanksgiving corresponds to the English and continental European Harvest festival, with churches decorated with cornucopias, pumpkins, corn, wheat sheaves, and other harvest bounty, English and European harvest hymns sung on the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend, and scriptural selections drawn from biblical stories relating to the Jewish harvest festival of Sukkot. While the actual Thanksgiving holiday is on a Monday, Canadians may gather for their Thanksgiving feast on any day during the long weekend, with Saturday being the least common. Thanksgiving in Canada is also often a time for weekend getaways. Incidentally, Canadian Thanksgiving coincides with the U.S. observance of Columbus Day and has done so since the United States implemented the Uniform Monday Holiday Act in 1971 (most countries in the Western Hemisphere fix Columbus Day to October 12). As such, American towns with high levels of Canadian tourism will often hold their fall festivals over Thanksgiving/Columbus Day weekend in part to draw and accommodate Canadian tourists.Border towns also often experience an uptick in shoppers at grocery stores, as Canadian shoppers take advantage of lower taxes and commodity prices in the United States over the long holiday.
Posted on: Mon, 13 Oct 2014 10:47:44 +0000