THE STORY OF Thanksgiving is enshrined in American lore. In November 1620 the Mayflower ferried 102 passengers, many of them English Pilgrims, across the Atlantic to Cape Cod, Massachusetts. They were helped through the deprivations of their first winter by local Wampanoag Indians, who offered provisions and advice. Following a successful harvest the next year, the 50 surviving Pilgrims and 90 Indians celebrated with a turkey feast. The way Americans celebrate the holiday today—as an annual, secular event—is a 19th-century invention. This year some 53m people in America are expected to travel for the holiday, and a surge in covid-19 cases is almost certain to follow. But America is not the only country that celebrates Thanksgiving. Where else observes the holiday?
Harvest festivals have taken place for thousands of years in myriad cultures. China’s Mid-Autumn Festival, at which dense, round pastries called mooncakes are eaten, stems from a millennia-old Chinese practice of moon worship. Jews celebrate Sukkot, a week-long holiday commemorating an ancient pilgrimage linked to the harvest. But none of these is referred to as a giving of thanks.
Canada’s is. Not to be outshone by their North American neighbours, many Canadians insist that the origins of their Thanksgiving predate those of the United States. The first supposedly took place in 1578, when an expedition led by Martin Frobisher, an English sailor, held a ceremony in present-day Nunavut, a northern territory, to celebrate the successful crossing. In 1879 Canada’s Parliament established a national Thanksgiving Day, though the exact date has varied. Since 1957 it has been celebrated on the second Monday in October (being further north, Canada’s harvest season starts earlier). Canadian celebrations differ little from those in America. However one modern tradition has been slower to cross the border. Canadians used to prefer bargain hunting in Boxing Day sales on December 26th, as Britons tend to, rather than splurging in Black Friday sales after Thanksgiving. In recent years, though, shops have jumped on the American retail bonanza to boost their pre-Christmas takings.
Another country that celebrates Thanksgiving is 7,000km from Cape Cod. Liberia, a west African state of 5m people, was founded in 1847 by freed American slaves (before then it was a colony run by the American Colonisation Society, a group created by white Americans to send freed slaves back to Africa). Today their descendents, known as Americo-Liberians, still number around 120,000. Liberia’s Thanksgiving is on the first Thursday of November, and the mostly Christian country uses the occasion as a day of worship. Liberians come together at the dinner table too, over dishes such as jollof rice and pepper chicken, as well as fare familiar to American Thanksgiving dinners such as cornbread and collard greens.
A handful of other places observe the holiday in their own ways, most because of America. Grenada celebrates Thanksgiving on October 25th, though instead of marking the start of the harvest it commemorates an American invasion of 1983, when soldiers stopped a coup. And many Filipinos still mark the day, a hangover from the country’s time as an American colony during the first half of the 20th century. But America’s most successful Thanksgiving export is not the day itself, but the Black Friday sales that follow it.
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