Happy Whatever
Mustang Bobby notes: Happy Thanksgiving, Eh? Yes the second Monday in October is Thanksgiving Day in Canada.
The Federal government has decided to call it Columbus Day, even though it should be the 12th of October which was the second Wednesday in 1492. But it’s okay that the holiday is on the wrong day, because Christopher Columbus [AKA: Cristoforo Colombo, Cristóbal Colón] didn’t find what he was looking for and identified what he did find incorrectly. The important thing is that a large area of the map got changed from “here be dragons and sea serpents,” to “here be gold and cannibals” and no mention was made of the oppressive heat, mosquitoes, or hurricanes.
It’s a big day for Italians in the US, even though Colombo was Genoese, not Italian, as there was no Italy until just before the American Civil War.
But, hey, holidays are all about frauds and misconceptions in furtherance of a day off. In 1492 Isabel la Católica, Queen Regnant of Castile and Leon; Queen Consort of Aragon, Majorca, Naples and Valencia; Countess Consort of Barcelona, was more concerned to ridding her realm of non-Catholics, and had a “whatever” attitude about Cristóbal Colón. Her support amounted to a piece of paper telling people to supply him with men and ships out of their own pockets, not her treasury.
So while Chris sailed the “ocean blue”, ‘Bel and Ferd with the Dominican friar Tomás de Torquemada as the first Inquisitor General, pursued a policy of “religious cleansing” which provided important material for Monty Python.
We end up on a landmass named for a Florentine employee of the de Medici family, because a Freiburger [there was no Germany until 1870] cartographer read a probably bogus book of letters. OTOH, you have to give Vespucci points for figuring out that he probably wasn’t in Asia.
8 comments
And no one ever mentions the fact the the Norsemen probably were here hundreds of years before any of them. We should be called Erika or something.
Of course, the Inuit circle the Arctic, and if you had asked they would have told you about it, anytime in the last 5000 or so years. The Inuit on Greenland knew it was there.
It’s amazing how many place names and major features when translated from their Native American roots end up being “it’s a river, stupid” or “we call them mountains” or “what did you say?”
It’s fairly difficult to “discover” a “new” land when there are millions of people living there.
And the forbearers of the First Poeple, who walked over a land bridge 10,500 years ago… but hay, they weren’t White Male Christians so they don’t count. Some things never change.
free burgers, wolf eggs, and scores of rivers named it’s a river, stupid. happy whatever to you, too.
They lacked a media rep, Keith, or they would have gotten credit. They also didn’t dress the part. How can you take people seriously who aren’t wearing wool and iron in the Caribbean? Let this be a lesson to people who support open immigration – look what happened to the First Nations.
Hipparchia, I’m sure the “Minute Men” would have a fit about all of the Italian flags in New York City for Columbus Day. It’s almost as bad as the flags of Ireland on St. Patrick’s Day.
Do you celebrate with a Moosehead and Poutine?
I believe the tradition is to watch last year’s Stanley Cup final. The beverage and food choice, as with many things Canadian, is province variable.
Berkeley observed Indigenous Peoples’ Day, FWIW.