When she sits around the palace, she sits AROUND the palace!

Happy Victoria Day, drunken Canadians! Victoria Day is a famous holiday invented a million years ago in Olde Englande – possibly the Victorian age, I’ll Wikipedia it later – to celebrate Queen Victoria, a frumpy fat lady (note: fat for the time period, by modern standards she’d wear a size Medium at Wal-Mart) who was Queen of Olde Englande And Her Majestic Vermin-Infested Colonies. She married her first cousin and plopped out 9 inbred kids, continuing a long tradition among British monarchs of fucking their relatives. She was so good at being incestuous and fat that we named a city full of smiling, colonial plump-faced white people in Ye Olde Britishe Columbiae after her. We also named a holiday in May after her, because Canadians salivate over the prospect of getting any possible day off from their miserable soul-crushing jobs.

Victoria Day is celebrated on the Monday that follows May 24, leading to the holiday being colloquially referred to as “May Two-Four”. This is a uniquely Canadian reference to a “Two-Four” case of beer, so named because counting into double digits is hard, eh.

Canadians honour the memory of Queen Victoria, the longest-serving monarch in British history, by waiting in traffic all day on Friday to get away from their suburban gated communities and into “nature”, a term which covers the 99.999%-odd percent of our nation’s land-mass that isn’t within the city limits of a city large enough to sustain an NHL franchise. Canadians often choose to observe Victoria Day by mooching off their buddy for 3 days because he’s got a cottage. Oh, it’s ok, you’re not mooching, you bought the guy some hot-crossed buns from the farmer’s market on the way in, and a case of whatever beer is on sale, Lake-something, sure, grab it.

Then you can celebrate our enduring British traditions and our country’s uniquely close bond to the Queen and to the Crown by getting drunk outdoors and sitting around a campfire as some asshole you knew from high school tries to remember the chords to a Tragically Hip song on the acoustic guitar he just happened to have. You suck back another beer and then decide it would be hilarious to jump into the lake, but it’s fucking freezing, because it’s Canada, and it’s only May. Then you drink some more and tell that story of the fat broad from Hamilton from the shallow end of the gene pool that you met at a bar in university – classic story – and in some whimsical, cosmic way, it’s as if Queen Victoria herself was taking her rightful throne in the storytelling of those young Canadians celebrating the day for which she was named in the country which she half-heartedly let us keep.

Long may she reign.