Thanksgiving, 1945

Gusty, chilling winds pushed belligerently down from the Arctic and out onto the great plains, and warned wheatgrowers to hurry with the last of the harvesting. Along the country roads of Ontario and Quebec, the white breath of horses pulling farm wagons marked the imminence of winter as much as the opulent piles of stacked hardwood in the sheds.

On the long, curving road that hugs the fertile banks of the St. Lawrence all the way from Montreal to Quebec, the dollhouse shacks of tourist camps were boarded tight, and French Canadian schoolchildren walked close together against the wind. Everywhere, weeks ahead of the U.S., the birches, beeches and maples passed from red and yellow into sere brown.

In the late autumn of 1945 there were still disturbing inconveniences and uncertainties. Coal was scarce and in the cities firewood was almost unobtainable. Strikes were spreading. Management, resentful of Government controls, was beginning to resist. What was more, before winter's end there would surely be other frightening reconversion humps for the Dominion to climb. Yet Canada, celebrating Thanksgiving Day* last week, found plenty to be thankful for.

At many a Thanksgiving Day dinner table, a returned veteran carved unrationed turkey; 159,000-odd sun-browned and sturdy servicemen were already back home for good, and more were coming. And Canada had money in the bank. It had a job well done to look back upon, a bright future ahead. The war had been expensive ($15,210,394,166 to March 31, 1945), but the dividend was a vastly increased productivity. Canada had been spared the ghastly ruin that befell the nations of Europe. And, unlike Europe, Canada this year would not be tormented by want of food.

Best of all, the national peril had passed. On Thanksgiving Day 1945, for the first time in six weary, withering years, there was something more than the fortunate inadequacies of Axis power to be grateful for. There was peace.

*Canada's first Thanksgiving (in Halifax 1763) celebrated the Treaty of Paris. The first after Confederation celebrated the return to health of the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) in 1871. Now Canada has ". . . a day of general thanksgiving to Almighty God for the bountiful crop and other blessings."

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