For many Canadians, the end of November is a puzzling time of year, because we start hearing from American friends about the stresses of Thanksgiving, which include arduous travels to see quarrelsome relatives. Both the timing and the argumentativeness of Thanksgiving seem baffling. In Canada, Thanksgiving is celebrated on the second Monday of October, not the fourth Thursday in November. More importantly, Thanksgiving in Canada is a relaxing, lazy holiday, not the ordeal of overheated consumption and forced family togetherness that seems to be the case for our unfortunate neighbors to the south. Family feuds undoubtedly take place over some Canadian dinner tables, but the stereotypical yelling match with a racist uncle or aunt isn’t a ritual here.

At first glance, these differences would appear to be superficial. But they actually provide some insight into the very distinct national identities of the two countries.

Thanksgiving in both countries is rooted in ancient European harvest festivals, and in both countries it didn’t properly become a national holiday until the 19th century, when the two fledgling nations strove to create institutions of national unity. The idea of Thanksgiving as a national holiday in the United States was the handiwork of one woman, the astonishing novelist, editor, and cultural impresario Sarah Josepha Hale. Starting in the 1840s via her editorial perch at Godey’s Lady’s Book, the most widely read American magazine of the day, Hale launched a relentless campaign to make Thanksgiving, then celebrated in different days in different states, a fixed national holiday.

Fatefully, the origins of American Thanksgiving were tied up with the very divisions that led to the bloodiest war ever fought on North American soil, for Hale was motivated in no small part by worries about national unity. As slavery continued to fester, cultural mavens like Hale hoped that in creating national holidays, the country could unite in celebration and overcome regional differences. While some Southern states did go along with her proposal, there was also resistance. In the words of historian Diana Karter Appelbaum, author of Thanksgiving: An American Holiday, An American History, the idea of a national feast celebration was seen as a “Yankee abolitionist holiday.” In 1856, Virginia Governor Joseph Johnson thundered, “This theatrical national claptrap of Thanksgiving has aided other causes in setting thousands of pulpits to preaching ‘Christian politics’ instead of humbly letting the carnal Kingdom alone and preaching singly Christ crucified.” The “Christian politics” Johnson disliked was abolitionism.

Within the very DNA of American Thanksgiving is an argument about national identity. Even the food consumed on that holiday contains an implicit message about the origins of the country. As food writer Robert Moss noted in a shrewd essay for Serious Eats, “Thanksgiving was a Yankee holiday, birthed in New England and adorned with that region’s symbols and traditions: pilgrims, turkey, pumpkins, and cranberries.” In 1863, during the very heart of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, at the behest of the redoubtable Sarah Josepha Hale, proclaimed Thanksgiving as a national holiday, thus solidifying its status as the day when a fractious nation tries to unite.