Context:
AS now lives in Seattle, but grew up in Blenheim, Ontario in Canada and remembers how people celebrated Victoria Day every May.
Main Piece:
“Our holiday in May is called Victoria Day instead of Memorial Day, and it’s very widely known as the May 2-4 Weekend because cases of beer come with 24, and it’s typically around the 24th of May. So it’s May 2-4 Weekend, everybody loses their minds, it’s generally warm enough that you can go camping. There’s tons of underage drinking which is saying something because the drinking age is pretty young in Canada anyway.”
Analysis:
This holiday tradition seems to parallel many American traditions as well. Holidays that are not associated largely with spending time with family tend to instead turn to drinking and partying instead. While Victoria Day is an institutionally enforced holiday, the extrapolation into the full May 2-4 Weekend and the subsequent packaging of 24-beer cases seems to have arisen from the folk. It is apt that a holiday weekend in May would generate such interest in Canada since Canada is a very cold country for the winter season and, like AS mentioned, May is when the weather starts heating up again. It seems like it goes hand in hand with other festivals of springtime, celebrating the end of the winter.