That was a question I got asked quite often the first couple of years I was here. Quite easily. Actually.
They/we don't have Thanksgiving in New Zealand. Unlike the shamelessly imitative Canadians who have "Canadian Thanksgiving," when your climate is temperate and your main agricultural products were dairy (year round), meat, and wool (spring shearing) there was really no cultural equivalent of harvest.
The functional equivalent of Thanksgiving in the Antipodes (this includes Australia) is Easter (if it falls late), in the sense that it's a 4 day holiday in autumn, or ANZAC Day (the Antipodean Memorial Day). So those are our basically secular autumnal holidays that cause delays at airports.
[Easter? Basically secular!? Yes. If 2% of the population goes to church weekly, and way less than half rediscover their affiliation at Easter and Christmas, it becomes a commercial festival instead]
Even though you can live without Thanksgiving, it's still a great holiday. It's secular, and thus inclusive of the whole country. And there's no presents. It's just about eating and spending time with family and friends. Gotta love that. Whether it would be worth traveling with the masses in the air and on the roads, I'm not so sure.
Harvest itself was a local event, it's timing dictated by local weather conditions and the state of the crop. You couldn't put on the table much more than what was grown within a hundred miles of you.
Traveling coast-to-coast or out-of-state for Thanksgiving is a recent phenomena, only made possible by the jet aircraft. It's almost a perversion of the holiday, especially since the Pilgrims in the beginning had little hope of ever seeing the families they'd left behind in England.
Stay home. Eat well. Happy Thanksgiving!
Posted by robe0419 at November 24, 2004 11:57 AM