It’s perhaps a sad reflection on the times in which we live that we actually need a holiday called Family Day.

But there you have it. Monday will be the first official Family Day in Ontario, and a day off to boot.

Now we can all stop ignoring our families, and for one blissful 24 hours, wrap ourselves in the warm embrace of familial bliss.

It’s quite the presumption, after all. Are we really a society so removed from our families that we need an official day to reconnect? In truth, no. Not anymore than Mother’s Day is the lone day of the year we send our love to mom (Of course, many moms believe the first day after Labour Day to be Mother’s Day, but that’s a topic for another time).

At least Family Day is better than ‘flag day’ or whatever else the long-planned holiday for the third week of February might have been called.

Family Day is as good a name as any. Let’s hope the intent of the day, as determined by its name, retains more purpose than other single-day holidays, like Victoria Day for instance.

The moniker ‘May 2-4’ actually has more meaning, even though the holiday may not actually fall on the 24th of May. The number has more to do with alcohol consumption and the celebration of the start of the summer season than anything to do with Victoria.

For those who are interested, May 24 is Queen Victoria’s birthday. You remember her. She reigned from 1837-1901 and was Queen Elizabeth’s great-great-grandmother. Makes you wonder why we don’t update the holiday to Elizabeth Day.

It has been a holiday since 1845, having been declared so by the ‘Province of Canada.’ Do you think the original movers of that motion could ever imagine a time when Victoria Day meant not being able to consume alcohol in a provincial park? Those prim and proper Victorians must be spinning in their graves.

But I digress. Getting back to Family Day, here’s a question: didn’t we used to have a family day called Sunday? Whatever happened to that day of tranquility and reflection? Oh yeah, we decided in our collective wisdom that Sunday should become just another day to bow to the relentless forces of consumerism.

As it is, Family Day actually has more of a chance of being a day spent with the family than Sunday. As with other statutory holidays, most, but not all, of the stores will be closed Monday.

Call it Family Day if you want, but no one’s going to quibble over the real purpose of the holiday: to give long-suffering denizens of a winter-weary land a break between New Year and Easter.

We can all raise the flag, or another item of your choice, to that one.