Victoria Day (in French: FĂȘte de la Reine) is a federal Canadian public holiday celebrated on the last Monday before May 25, in honour of Queen Victoria's birthday. The date is also, simultaneously, that on which the current reigning Canadian sovereign's official birthday is recognized. It is sometimes informally considered as marking the beginning of the summer season in Canada.
The holiday has been observed since before Canada was formed, originally falling on the sovereign's actual birthday, and continues to be celebrated in various fashions across the country on the fixed date; the holiday has always been a distinctly Canadian observance. It is a statutory holiday federally, as well as in six of Canada's ten provinces and all three of its territories. In Quebec, the same day was, since the Quiet Revolution, unofficially known as FĂȘte de Dollard until 2003, when provincial legislation officially named the same date as Victoria Day the National Patriots' Day.
Read more about Victoria Day: History, Provincial and Territorial Legislation, Practice
Famous quotes containing the words victoria and/or day:
“Sometimes my wife complains that shes overwhelmed with work and just cant take one of the kids, for example, to a piano lesson. Ill offer to do it for her, and then shell say, No, Ill do it. We have to negotiate how much I trespass into that mother roleits not given up easily.”
—Anonymous Father. As quoted in Women and Their Fathers, by Victoria Secunda, ch. 3 (1992)
“Any one who knows what the worth of family affection is among the lower classes, and who has seen the array of little portraits stuck over a labourers fireplace ... will perhaps feel with me that in counteracting the tendencies, social and industrial, which every day are sapping the healthier family affections, the sixpenny photograph is doing more for the poor than all the philanthropists in the world.”
—Macmillans Magazine (London, September 1871)