Thanksgiving Should Be in October

You are so tired! I can tell because I’m tired too. In a couple of days, tens of millions of Americans will get on planes or trains or highways, crunching our limbs in godless ways for hours on end, worrying if we left the stove on or packed enough layers. We will fight the crowds, brave the chaos, pay the money. And then we will get to wherever we’re going, and we’ll eat. It will probably be lovely, or maybe it will be bad, but either way, it will be a little nuts because we will then (then!), in less than the time it takes a carton of half-and-half to go bad, do it all again.

Or at least many of us, those who are gluttons for punishment, will. We’ll move our bodies and our belongings around the country during precisely the time of year when the climate becomes, in many places, dark, wet, icy, and freezing—again. We’ll contemplate togetherness, and family, and potatoes—again. Maybe we’ll watch football—again. Many of us will eat turkey—again. We’ll pack all our traveling and relative-wrangling and big-mealing into one overstuffed, exhausting month, and for no extrinsic reason.

There’s a better way to do things, and in fact another country already does it. That country is Canada, and it celebrates Thanksgiving in October. We should too.

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