When you leave the motherland and become an immigrant in a country with a different culture than your own, you celebrate the holidays of the new culture so that the locals don’t persecute you for your antiquated beliefs. Assimilation is beautiful. If you’re lucky you may also have the opportunity and responsibility to celebrate the holidays of your homeland, to preserve culture, and to avoid forgetting where you came from, and more importantly to capitalize on compensated holiday hours.

Thus I have called in a personal/religious/sick/cultural afternoon to ensure that I don’t forget my wonderful Saskatchewan heritage. I will spend my Family Day sitting on the floor eating trailmix missing my family but glad all the same that I don’t live in Saskatoon. I could use the old rhetoric that my friends are my family, but as I don’t have any of those here either I will instead recall stories of my family life by staring at each each almond and cashew and thinking about how trailmix has been a part of my life since I was fully toothed.

I guess Family Day isn’t government celebrated in Quebec because it is not named after St. Family and if it was no one would care anyway because in this pagan province no one is Catholic anymore. Where did they lose their way? With the formation of the new god, les Canadiens de Montreal, I guess.

Family could be the newest religion. Nearly new parents worship their pregnant stomach with soft-porn black and white photos of stretched skin. New parents praise their children by showering them with hundreds of gifts on the holy days of birth anniversaries and Christmases and by sacrificing animals to the health and growth of the children. We are not far from making bronze busts of our first born children and when this happens Family Day will be like all the rest of the holy days; owned by a large conglomerate, signifying a week long sale on cheap goods created by the family of the aforementioned new immigrants who celebrate bizarre holidays just to get an extra two days off a year.

Until then, we remember how much we love those we were born with and how much we miss beating them at crokinole. Save me a spot at the Family Day supper feast,  I’ll be there in spirit.

Attached are the two most recent family photos I have.
Love you all.