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This is Victoria Day weekend up here in the Frozen North. Used to have a little poem that everyone used to say about it...
The twenty-fourth of May
Is the Queen's birthday.
If you don't give us a holiday,
We'll all run away.
Of course, I don't think we ever actually DID run away, but then, we always got our holiday, so the veracity of our threats was never truly tested.
When I was a kid, Victoria Day weekend was always the first real weekend spent at our cottage up on the Ottawa River. It was often quite cold, and there were always tons of mosquitoes, but wherever we lived, we would make the trip up there to stay for three days, so it was kind of special.
We kids would almost always go in swimming too... which was incredibly daring now that I look back on it, because the water was often so cold that it would turn your lips blue and make your teeth chatter within a minute or two. But we were tough little devils and it was our tradition... set us apart from the wussy parents who wouldn't come out in the water past their knees... (-:
One other tradition that we always had back then was to buy one of those "deluxe family fireworks kits" with assorted Roman candles, fountains, volcanoes, some spinning things that you nailed onto the side of a post, a bunch of sparklers, and...of course... the grand finale... the burning school house.
On Victoria Day evening, we would sit on the beach... usually just my parents and brothers... and set off the fireworks... In all, I can't imagine that there could have been more than 12 or 15 "pieces", but it would seem to take all evening to set the whole works off... maybe because the night sky was usually dark and very starry, so it filled in the gaps.
The rockets and fountains and Roman candles were all good, but what I remember best are the sparklers... because we would each light 2 at a time and race around on the beach, spinning and leaping and tracing crazy patterns in the dark....
And then, at the very end, we would set fire to the school house... which was always a strange event... almost silent except for a quiet hissing as the cardboard walls curled and blackened and then turned to ash and blew off into the night...
Then there would just be darkness and silence...
About 5 years ago, I got a similar family pack of fireworks and we blew them off here at the farm...with my parents and one of my brothers. It was great.... and the best part was when we all lit up sparklers and went tearing around the big lawn around the house, in the dark, doing our spinning and leaping... albeit a little more slowly... even my dad took a shot at it... bad foot and all... It was hilarious... we laughed until we fell down...
And then we burned the school house down... same hissing...
Same darkness and silence...
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