Origins of Thanksgiving (in the United States and Canada)

Both the American and Canadian Thanksgiving celebrate the end of the harvest, but they are very different holidays: Americans are forced to spend the holiday with in-laws, whereas Canadians can celebrate it with whomever they dam well please.
Otherwise, they're the same because the United States stole Thanksgiving from Canada, as you'll see later.
Each year, citizens of both countries have Thanksgiving to thank the Lord for three things:

• Getting fatter and fatter each year
• The fact that Ice Capades hasn't made its way north
• The fact that a lot of ice separates Canada from Sarah Palin

The U.S. holiday is modeled after a feast in Plymouth in 1621. Naturally, the people in southern states didn't like anything from northern states. But northerners encouraged southerners to go along, saying they could even e-mail talkline@butterball.com with any questions about cooking turkeys. Southerners complained that the Internet hadn't yet been invented, as Al Gore hadn't been born yet. But soon southerners had no choice about the holiday, as Northerners dominated the federal government and forced the holiday upon southerners.
In 1863, Pres. Abraham Lincoln said that to unite the country, Americans would have to end slavery, kill turkeys and watch football. That year, on Oct. 3, he proclaimed a national day of thanksgiving to be celebrated on Thursday, November 26. Subsequent presidents also chose the last Thursday in November.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, however, wanted to boost the economy with more holiday shopping. So in 1942, he declared Thanksgiving the fourth Thursday. Of course, the fourth Thursday is usually the last, which led Roosevelt to coin the word "Duh!"
But Roosevelt apparently planned ahead, as 1944 had five Thursdays, so Americans got an extra seven days of Christmas shopping that year. (The next November with five Thursdays is 2012.)
In the following decades, people began to move around the country and decided that getting stranded in an airport was preferable to spending time with in-laws. So Thanksgiving became a day to thank airlines for long delays and cancellations.
In Canada, Thanksgiving goes back to 1578. To take a break, Martin Frobisher, an Englishman who explored Canada's northeast coast, went to Boston Market to buy a turkey and to tax Americans for their tea. Realizing he had arrived 195 years too soon to protest the tea party, he went back to Newfoundland to celebrate his safe arrival in the New World by killing a turkey.Canadians loved the celebration so much that they quickly made it a national holiday 301 years later.
Canada's first Thanksgiving in 1578 preceded America's first celebration by 43 years, yet Canada's holiday only fell a couple of weeks before the American one.So as not to appear to have stolen the idea from the United States, Parliament, in 1957, moved the holiday even earlier, to the second Monday in October. Another reason for the move: Most of Canada is buried in snow by November, therefore:

• It's too cold and difficult to get out of the igloos to hunt down a turkey
• Many Canadians got sick of ordering in Domino's Pizza for Thanksgiving
• The pizza deliverymen complained the igloos had no doors to knock on

Oh, and the harvest ends a bit earlier in Canada, as the country is further north. So that was yet another reason to celebrate the end of harvest in early October.
So at the end of harvest, Canadians and Americans stuff themselves with turkey and top if off with a healthy dose of fruit in the form of pumpkin pie.

This posting comes at the request of Caryn, my most loyal commenter. Ahem, people, you can comment on my posts. Thanks to those who let me know my musings are actually being read.

The factual information, if you can distinguish it from the jokes, comes from the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on Thanksgiving, thanks to the awesome online resources available from the Vancouver Public Library.