We take a lot of time off in Canada. This is a matter of necessity, of course; we all live beside lakes, with docks and boats and stuff, except for those of us who live beside excellent ski hills. So we need our leisure time.

Our holidays are somewhat similar to what they have in the U.S., but there are some differences.

There are also a lot of holidays we don’t take off work or school, like Valentine’s Day, Halloween, Father’s Day and Mother’s Day. The flexibility of these holidays can tempt parents to get tricky; I spent my first 20 years thinking the last Saturday in June was Topsy Turvy day, on which the kids cooked and cleaned and Mom watched cartoons and played. Thanks, Mom.

So I thought I’d take a moment to run through our actual days off for you, starting with our national statutory holidays. These are days we are mandated to take off by law, unless we work in a convenience store or movie theatre or some fast-food places and discount shoe emporium in that corner of the dowtown mall nobody goes to anymore.

• New Year’s Day: January 1. This holiday was created because Canadians know how to celebrate New Year’s Eve, which is not a holiday but is treated like one, and requires a day to recuperate.
• Good Friday: The Friday before Easter. This changes year by year for reasons I don’t really understand, which means I’m usually scrambling to buy stale chocolate eggs the night before, because I didn’t know.
• Canada Day: July 1. This is the birthday of our country, the anniversary of the signing of the paper that made us a country separate from Britain. We’re still waiting for evidence that this actually happened. Sometimes Canada Day falls on a Monday or Friday, which means we get a long weekend. It sucks when it’s on a Thursday.
• Labour Day: The first Monday in September. This holiday also coincides with the beginning of the school year, and is meant to celebrate the union movement. Once, I worked on my roof on labour day and a guy in a pickup truck yelled at me.
• Christmas Day: December 25. This is observed in some other countries, too. I don’t much like it because there’s never enough gravy.

Canada’s provinces celebrate some other statutory holidays; they’re all different and some don’t mark them at all. They are not technically statutory holidays but most employers treat them as such, there’s no school (when applicable) and most stores close. I’ll stick with Ontario, where I live:

• Family Day: The third Monday in February. This is a new holiday invented by Ontario’s current Premier, Dalton McGuinty, who included it in his most recent re-election campaign (the one where he said “no new taxes). He was elected on the basis of a day off in February, and is in the process of raising taxes. Because we’re sheep.
• Civic Holiday: The first Monday in August. Every city or town has the option of naming this holiday after someone significant, but few do. In my city, it’s named after our founding father. But nobody knows that. It’s usually called the August Long Weekend, and is a key date in the summer drunken softball circuit. I think. I can’t really remember, because I’m usually playing softball that weekend.
• Thanksgiving: The first Monday in October. Yeah, you heard right. October. We do Thanksgiving right. In Canada, we sit down to our massive turkey dinners when the leaves are still falling and the pilgrims can play their bagpipes or whatever it is they do without wearing gloves. Some people have ham for Thanksgiving, but we’re pretty sure they moved here from the U.S.

And then there are the weird ones:

• Victoria Day: The Monday on or before May 24. This is known in Canada as the May two-four weekend, two-four being slang for a case of beer, and weekend being slang for “The sun’s up already? Crack me a Molson Golden, bud.” This is not technically a statutory holiday for anyone other than federal employees, but we all observe it, because we need an extra day to open the cottage, what with all the drinking. While it’s called Victoria Day, it is meant to mark the birthday of the reigning monarch, whenever that may be.
• Remembrance Day: November 11. Marking the end of the First World War, this holiday is a sombre event meant to honour our war dead. Government workers and bank employees don’t go to work; everyone else does, and students go to school, but gather at memorials at 11 a.m.
• Boxing Day: December 26. The day after Christmas is a statutory holiday in some areas, but not in others. Municipalities are permitted to order stores to close on Boxing Day in order to give retail workers an extra day with their families. In others, retail workers get an extra day with crowds of angry, shoving shoppers anxious to save $50 on a Wii. On Boxing Day, you can hear the fighting at Walmart from my house.

This all works out to roughly one extra day off a month, except in June. I’ve been lobbying the government to make Topsy Turvy Day a real holiday, but Mom is pretending it never happened.