Canada does Thanksgiving differently. Specifically, they do it on the second Monday of October. So by the time late November rolls around, they're long done with it. Yesterday was just another workday up here.

So for what is sometimes referred to up here as "Yankee Thanks," Elisa and I ended up going to a potluck put together by an American expat group. It was in the party room of someone's Yaletown condo.

That tells you a lot right there if you have the ears to hear. Yaletown is a very trendy, expensive section of downtown Vancouver. The eyecatch banner across the top of the "Vancouver" magazine they tossed on our porch this morning read, "Real Estate: What's the New Yaletown?" So Yaletown means very stylish new high rises. Lots of polish. It also means like 800 square feet for about a million dollars. You might have your apartment in Yaletown professionally decorated, but there's no way you can have a real party there. So the buildings have common facilities you can sign up for. Expect them to be smallish, well furnished, surprisingly sterile, and buried in a couple layers of security to keep the homeless (people making like $50-75,000 a year) from wandering in.

And so there we were, in a surprisingly sterile but very expensive looking room with a fake fireplace and no heat sharing a melange of odd traditional Thanksgiving dishes - Elisa made her family recipe broccoli casserole - with the most mismatched bunch of farflung Americans you could imagine. I spent much of the evening talking movies with a guy who turned out to be a videogame director at EA. Outside, Canadians wandered by and wondered what the hell we were doing. I half expected someone to stick their head in and go, "um, is this an invasion?"

But despite all the weirdness, it was a good time. There was turkey and gravy and stuffing and wine. The EA guy's wife was some debutante type who turns out to make some damn fine pies. All was right with the world. I hope your Thanksgiving was perhaps more traditional, but just as pleasant.