While inflation is easing, turkey prices are up almost 17% since last year, ham about 9% and potatoes 15%. Better get to the store quick or all the good cranberries will be gone. Then when you get home let us raise a glass to good old Frobisher.

Frobisher? Who is Frobisher? You may well ask. Like Squanto (actually named Tisquantum) and Captain Shrimp (actually named Myles Standish), men credited with celebrating the first United States Thanksgiving, Frobisher is credited with celebrating the first Canadian Thanksgiving. In this holiday season, we should make a special effort to understand the ways people celebrate in foreign lands.

Who knew? This is just one more example of how little we Americans in the United States know about our neighbors, the Canadians, who, technically, are also Americans. Canada, a vast tract mostly to the north of the United States, remains a land of unfathomable mystery to United States citizens. For example, why does Canada have so few mass shootings compared to the United States?

Most people now reading this column know who the president of the United states is, but tell me: Who is the president of Canada?

Ha ha, that was a trick question, because Canada does not have a president. Canada has a prime minister. Justin Trudeau is Canada’s 23rd prime minister; and there is no truth, by the way, to the social media rumor that Justin Trudeau is actually the son of Fidel Castro. The Canadian government has denied the reports. Justin’s father, Pierre Trudeau, was Canada’s 15th prime minister. 

Back to Frobisher. In the days of Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth sponsored Sir Martin Frobisher, a licensed pirate who plundered French ships off the coast of Africa, to take three ships to discover a northwest passage to the Orient. It would have been a huge help to England in her quest to conquer the entire world if a shortcut from the Atlantic to the Pacific could have been found. Unfortunately, there wasn’t one. 

Consult your globe, and you will see that you could theoretically sail straight up from England, or, if you were a Viking, from Scandinavia, through the Canadian Archipelago, over the top of the North Pole into the Pacific, but in real life, this was not practicable, due to ice. While there is less arctic ice now, due to global warming, the trip is still fraught with difficulty and very cold.

In all, Frobisher made three trips. He got to Baffin Island, right below Greenland, but he couldn’t navigate around it. He lost a number of ships along the way, but the ship he was riding in always seemed to make it. While he never found a Northwest passage, he cleverly pretended he was actually looking for gold.

Frobisher arrived in North America 43 years before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock and celebrated the first North American Thanksgiving way up north in Nunavut in 1578.

Meanwhile, the Inuit, called Esquimaux by the French, kidnapped five of Frobisher’s men. According to Inuit legend, these men lived among the natives until they died trying to escape on some makeshift boat.

Again, Frobisher returned to England, carrying a family of three Inuits he had kidnapped as a curiosity to show the queen. They all died soon afterward. He also brought a cargo of several tons of ore, which unfortunately turned out to be iron pyrite, or fool’s gold. It was eventually used to pave roads.  

In closing, a somber warning: Do the Canadians realize that we are on their southern border, separated from their land only by the Detroit River, much as Mexico is separated from The United States only by the Rio Grande? Canada ended its COVID-19 border measures Oct. 1, allowing U.S. citizens once again to travel freely to and from their country. But, some ask, how long will it be before Canada sets up electric fences and guard towers and forces U.S. visitors to their shores to speak (shudder) French? Do they secretly refer to us as “les dos mouilles?”

Let us be thankful that so far the Canadians seem to be oblivious, giving us time to learn more of their mysterious ways. 

Have a good week.

(Martha Allen lives in Keene Valley. She has been writing for the News for more than 20 years.)