Where I live we have a province-wide statutory holiday called Family Day. Today. It always falls on the third Monday of February, and for as long as I’ve been working it has been a random day off in the middle of winter with a clear theme, but no clear method of celebration.
You don’t exchange cards or gifts.
It’s not something that we decorate for.
There are no fireworks, and you generally go to bed at a reasonable time because you’ve got to get up and go to work the next day.
And in the middle of February it is almost always too cold to do much outdoors beside bundle up and listen to everyone gripe about frozen toes and ears!
I’ve been pretty clear on the theme of this blog: cast iron cooking and outdoor adventure.
What I haven’t written much about (though I’ve alluded to frequently) is my family.
My wife of nearly eighteen years.
My teenage daughter.
My new puppy.
Relatives all across the country, and around the world.
And many good friends that have earned honourary aunt and uncle status with the kid.
And I’ve written about all of it for a long time. In fact, over the years I’ve created a few different websites, and if you had asked me a dozen years ago I’d have said that the biggest theme of most of my writing was fatherhood and how it intersects with all the other things in my life.
For example…
The first of the two notable websites was a “dad rules” blog, where I would come up with tongue-in-cheek rules for being a dad based on things the kid was doing, write about the silly antics babies and toddlers got up to, and tie it altogether into a cohesive article.
The second fatherhood website that got a lot of traction was my “This is Pi Day!” web comic. The name came from the idea that pi day, March 14th, was essentially just a celebration of both math and dad jokes. The whole day was just one big dad joke. My comic was mostly the kid character reacting to the dad joke sense of humour of the dad character. The site is still live, but if it happens not to be working when you click on it, note that I host it on a homebrew server in my basement that crashes occasionally.
While those two blogs were focused on family stories and how they interected with the things I was interested in, if you’ve read enough of this blog you’ll probablly note that it is spun around the other way: focused on the things I’m intersted and how it intersects with my family.
I cook and bake and set an example of sustainable, healthy eating while teaching these things to my daughter.
I run, camp, hike, and spend time outdoors, doing much of it with my family and to set an example to a kid who loves her screentime.
And I try to instill a sense of legacy and purpose into my work, the hobbies I do and tools I use to build up something to someday pass down to my now and future family.
These are the things I’m interested and how they intersect with family.
So, on this family day, a diversion from that regular focus to spin it back around for a moment: that’s my family and how it drives almost everything I do. No cards or gifts or decorations, just a quiet celebration at home today.