Be thankful for our many blessings - Keith Roulston editorial
Being an old farm kid, and having spent all my life (aside from three years in university) in one of the most productive farming areas of the world, I have always held Thanksgiving Day up as one of the most important holidays of the year.
I see by the Canadian Encyclopedia that Thanksgiving only became an official national holiday in 1957, but giving thanks for the bounty of nature has been part of many lives since medieval times and the first Thanksgiving in North America was celebrated by Martin Frobisher in the eastern Arctic in 1578, years before the most famous celebration by the Pilgrim settlers in Massachusetts in 1621. Nova Scotia imported the American event as a way to celebrate the end of the Seven Years War in 1763.
In 1879, the Canadian Parliament declared Nov. 6 as the Canadian holiday, but, following World War I, this meant that with Remembrance Day on Nov. 11, we had two holidays close together. So, finally, in 1957, the holiday was officially designated for the second Monday in October. Some complained that this was too early.
When I was young this was not the case. Few people grew corn back then and soybeans were something that could be grown only well to the south of us. Mostly we grew oats, barley and winter wheat, then, and the harvest of those was ending about the time of Thanksgiving. Later, when corn and soybeans became the main crops grown in southern Ontario, the timing of the holiday became more of a problem.
To show how farming changes, when we moved to our current home nearly 50 years ago, the farmer who tended the rest of our farm grew white beans. It was a big crop in Huron in those days - bringing about the Zurich Bean Festival - but once soybeans were established, white beans were quickly replaced, for the most part, because soybeans were easier to grow, easier to harvest and more profitable.
Today, the large cash-cropper who rents the land, alternates 200 acres of corn one year and soybeans the next.
Growing up in the Anglican church, I remember that Thanksgiving generally got downplayed by Harvest Home. Parishioners decorated the church with the produce of their farms. We had a couple who owned a commercial apple orchard and so the moulding above the wainscotting was lined with hundreds of apples each year, usually a week before Thanksgiving. It was a tempting decoration for young parishioners like me; a real test of our honesty.
Canada is such an urbanized country today that Thanksgiving is just a day off work for many Ontarians in our rapidly growing nation. I’d bet that many people, especially kids, think food comes from a supermarket, not from a farm. For many, a better use of land is for much-needed housing rather than “useless” farmland. Residents of small towns, only a short distance from farms, are a little more knowledgeable.
We all should be grateful for the food grown in the fields and gardens of our land. We need to be thankful for the people who plant the crops and for the miracle of growth that sees the sufficient sun, warmth and rain God provides to grow them. We become rather blasé, because we so regularly have bountiful crops, but seeing the continuous fires across northern Canada throughout this past summer should teach us to be more grateful.
We are blessed to live in one of the most verdant regions of the world. As the human population swells and more farmland is plastered over with urban housing, the day will come when food isn’t as plentiful as it is today. We have adopted a culture of fast food restaurants that has made many of us unhealthily overweight. We are already paying a price for this in diseases from overeating and expensive hospital costs. Things will get worse, especially if we waste productive farmland under urban development.
Meanwhile, though even rural people don’t grow the gardens they once did and we don’t, generally, have stay-at-home moms who can and freeze fruits and vegetables, we eat better than we ever did. On Thanksgiving, we should show our gratitude for our blessings. Though we constantly hear complaints about the cost of food, we have a plentiful diet that keeps people, in general, better fed than at any time in our history - while we work less hard.
This Thanksgiving should be a better time to give thanks than any fall in history - not just for our food, but for the general prosperity of our modern lives. When I think back to my family and our neighbours when I was young, the lives we lead today, with our fine homes and cars, our fine clothes and (for many) winter vacations, we have never lived so well. For this, we should all be thankful.