With the recent addition of Family Day in February, we’ve got statutory holidays in pretty much every month:
- January: New Year’s Day
- February: Family Day
- March: Easter
- April: um, sometimes Easter is here instead of March
- May: Victoria Day
- June: ???
- July: Canada Day
- August: BC Day
- September: Labor Day
- October: Thanksgiving
- November: Remembrance Day
- December: Christmas
What we need is a new holiday for June to help smooth over the gap between Victoria Day and Canada Day. Let’s take a look at how the holidays currently break down:
- Honoring the country/province/monarchy: 3
- Being grateful for what we have/what others have sacrificed: 2
- Religious: 2
- Honoring workers: 1
- What the hell, let’s just slap a holiday in here: 1
- Honoring family: 1
The clear favorite is a holiday honoring some kind of government. This is perhaps not surprising since it’s the government that gets to make the holidays. We already have holidays for the country, province and the Queen. That means we’d probably have to go macro (the world) or micro (the city). City Day probably wouldn’t fly so let’s go with World Day. It sounds grand, almost important. We can say it’s all about remembering how we’re all in this together.
But if that doesn’t fly, we need a backup. Adding more religious holidays would be too controversial, even if Christmas is just a bunch of gift-giving and crass commercialism, and just as many people associate Easter with a magical bunny that delivers candy eggs as they do the resurrection of the son of God. So religion is out.
Family and workers have holidays so it’s highly unlikely another could be squeezed in. Honoring/remembering is also covered adequately with Thanksgiving and Remembrance Day. This really only leaves the “What the hell, let’s slap a holiday in here” category, currently represented by New Year’s Day (come on, what makes the first day of the calendar so important it requires an official holiday? As discussed in the previous post, our calendar doesn’t even work properly).
June is the month in which summer begins, so maybe we could do Summer Day. Except that’s kind of lame. No one would buy that.
Maybe it could be a celebration of some group everyone likes or even loves. Like babies. Baby Day. Except that comes a bit close to Family Day, so probably a no-go. Most people like doctors. Doctor Day. It even has some nice alliteration. On the other hand, a lot of people view doctors as overpaid rich folk that also happen to cure sickness and save lives, so there may not be enough of a groundswell to support Doctor Day.
We need something that all Canadians love and cherish. Framing it that way, the choice is obvious: Hockey Day.
But Hockey Day in June makes no sense, even if the Stanley Cup Playoffs absurdly drag into that month.
Canadians also generally love maple syrup, poutine, moose, beavers, snow and being nice, at least as far as most Americans think (those who realize Canada is not actually part of the US, that is). Unfortunately, these are all too weak to put forth as official holidays.
Well, I give up. I say we just declare some Monday or Friday in June as statutory holiday and it can be whatever anyone wants it to be. We’ll call it National Holiday Day. There, done.
