As you gently awaken to the sound of seal pups barking on the prairies and the smell of fresh-brewed pemmican in the sod kitchen below, you linger for a moment in your goose-down inukshuk. In a hushed metric tone, you greet the morning in the traditional Canadian way:
“O Canada! Land of tundra and oatcakes! Majestic nation of calligraphy and tarmac! Home of the right whale and the centre pike. Where the wilderness beckons like a Kapuskasing call girl: ‘Petawawa! Petawawa!’ Bonséjour!”
Donning goggles to protect your eyes from the blinding Northern Lights, you remove your night skates and portage down the stairs to the sweat lodge, where, huddled around the blazing chesterfield, your guests await, having arrived in the dead of night from the most exotic corners of the nation: Pugwash, Chibougamau, Sudbury. Approaching stealthily like a terry fox, you offer a Canada Day greeting: “Banff.” “Burton,” they reply.
You then enjoy a Canadian breakfast of barley grouts, Canola bread, and bull rush brûlée, washed down with coffee-water and ptarmigan milk. “I feel like a Hamilton disk jockey,” you joke, as who doesn’t on Canada Day? Your guests respond with barbershop throat singing, as is their custom despite the complaints.
But now hurry! Hurry hard! It’s time for the unfurling of the flag! Gathering up your spades and compression bandages, your party lightfoots it in fiddle formation to the Canadian shield where the flag has been fermenting underground in a vat of maple juice for the past six weeks.
Reciting the words of beloved Canadian poet Farley Celine (“We twist the neck to make the goose dead/Next we pop an ice-cold Moosehead”), you decant the flag using the greenest of gables, unfolding it gently in the storied ways of the Newfoundland kelp dangler. Breathing in the aromas with almost Atwoodian pleasure, you hoist the flag onto the diefenbaker and heartily sing the national anthem:
O Canada!
It’s about time you did those chores
They’re not going to do themselves,
You know!
Thanks a lot.
And we really mean it.
Not being sarcastic at all,
Though we know it’s hard to tell
When you’re singing.
Moved by patriotism and the intoxicating effects of maple juice, everyone hops a leacock home in time for the Canada Day Parade, which consists of punching each other in the pogey and abandoning snowmobiles in the street. Eventually, the snowmobile carcasses will be picked clean by ravenous beavers, whose traditional donair supply has been decimated by colonialism and the CBC.
After the ladies indulge in a traditional round of sexual innuendo (“Is that a Lower Canada Rebellion or are you just happy to see me?”), you feast on mukluks, candied trebek and freshly squeezed jus-d’edmonton.
Finally, the celebrations draw to a close with a three-day nap, except in Saskatchewan, which does not mark daylight saving time. Upon awakening, everyone does socialism.