I admit that is with somewhat mixed feelings that I celebrate Canada's birthday when I am so far away from it and the people I would normally celebrate with. This is my second Canada day here in England and the first one that I had the inclination to do anything. Having arrived only a few short weeks before last years, everything was far to foreign and overwhelming to feel festive enough to commemorate the country where I would feel comfortable and familiar. A year can do a lot to change ones perspective though. Now nothing here feels strange, the craziness that this country can sometimes produce is my new normal. We have stopped being asked daily where we are from or how long we are visiting for. Id like to think this means I have developed a posh British accent but it probably has more to do with us becoming familiar faces in the area and the loss of the stunned questioning look we wore everywhere for the first several months. In spite of being settled and happy here however I still feel Canadian so it is marginally annoying not to have large events to join in order to show this off. In fact my Canada days are now not very different than any other day here. My husband goes off to work, the kids have to attend school and I am left with a long list of tasks that need to be accomplished at home. Sadly there are no parades to watch, no group breakfasts to eat, and no firework shows to enjoy. In spite of this I couldn't help feeling an immense amount of Canadian pride and felt we needed to do at least something to mark this day as different than all my other days.
For me this meant spending the whole morning in the kitchen preparing picnic food, which come to think of it may be exactly how it would have gone if I was in Canada! Once we all arrived home after our various obligations we headed out to the park to show off our Canada flag hats. These lovely hats were bought for us by my sister as a farewell gift just before we left, given with the promise that we show them off every year we are not in our home country.
My sweet kiddies tend to be a little resistant to this idea, so worried about the stares that they have the ability to draw. They needn't have been all that concerned though as, unlike any park at home on Canada Day, we easily found a large section of shaded grass all to ourselves to enjoy our meal on. In fact there were so few people around that the courage level to wear the hats grew exponentially and before long they were running around as zombies in them.
Unclear what this says about Canada Day to them we did draw the attention of several passer bys that found the whole thing largely entertaining. Some even offering to snap a photo of the whole family behaving this way, which we politely declined. I like to think though that we made them remember their Canadian counterparts more actively and showed that despite loving this country we still proudly hold Canada in our hearts.
