Immigrants - by Darylynn Starr Rank
November, 2006

As we move to rapidly towards the December holiday season I keep thinking about when I first moved to Vancouver.  I’d started school at UBC and was trying to get used to Canada.  October rolled around that first year and my husband and I had Canadian Thanksgiving with my father-in-law, who’d been a widower for several years.  Since it was just the three of us, and it was October, I have to admit it didn’t mean very much to me.  Then.  (Remember it was my first year here.)  So we didn’t even have a turkey.  (I had no idea how to make one.)

Then November came, in Vancouver.  On the phone all my family and friends in the States talked about their plans for Thanksgiving.  Even asked me if I could come.  But they were in Miami, and the four day weekend most Americans take  simply wasn’t an option for someone at school in BC.  And it was much too far away for a four day trip for a student anyway.  (Read “expensive”.) 

I knew several students who were also Americans, and we were all sad and homesick that Thanksgiving (American style) was going to pass us by.  And the Christmas holidays were looming as well.  Some of them could go home for those holidays.  But not all, by any means. 

So we started talking one day and decided to try and be grown-ups and have our own American Thanksgiving, here.  The problems were numerous.  Most of the students  lived in campus dorms or tiny basement suites just like you’re supposed to when you’re a student.  I was married so at least my husband and I had a regular one-bedroom apartment.  But as newlywed students, naturally we were broke.  Which translated into hardly any furniture.  We had bought a bed, at least, and my husband had make our livingroom couch.  But we had nothing like a real dining room table. 

Not to mention, not one of us knew how to make a turkey.

Well, we did it anyway.  A long tablecloth (a wedding present) on the floor of the living room.  Potluck, with everyone bringing food.  And a lot of consulting back and forth about how to cook the turkey.  We annointed it “The Waif’s Thanksgiving.”  It was a lovely event with a lot of happiness and laughter sitting on that floor, but it was definitely tinged with homesickness and feeling out of place.

I think about that often, how lonely and strange we all felt here.  Especially as we move towards the holidays now.  It makes me think of all the other newcomers arriving from all over the world to settle in Vancouver.  Alone, some of them.  Some with families.  But all arriving in a new world, with new traditions, and customs, and ways of being.

Now I love Canadian Thanksgiving.  Consider it mine. But that wasn’t how it felt back then.

So I always remember how challenging it is to face the holidays – as well as everything else – in a new land.  It was important for me to find supportive people who were in the same position I was.  And over the years it’s been important for me to reach out to help the other newcomers, or people who are on their own.  I think it’s important for all of us.

Take care, all.

Darylynn Starr Rank (psychologist/writer) works part-time for Family Services of Greater Vancouver as a group facilitator. Her articles appear bi-weekly in The Record (New Westminster) and the Richmond Review.

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