During the war of 1812, The McKenzie family (comprising of Tobias and Elsie, the parents, their alcoholic son, Stephen, and their comely daughter, Margaret, and whose future successors were the famous McKenzie Brothers of International fame, fictiously played by Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas) were commissioned by the government of Upper Canada to infiltrate the American battalions and scour for information concerning battle plans.
While Tobias and Elsie acquired most of their information through games of chance and thievery, Margaret McKenzie acquired the bulk of the information gathered by the family through flirtation and the subsequent blackmail of American officers. Stephen, however, rarely contributed to the family business, and merely participated in, and won, numerous drinking competitions with the Americans, due to their weak beer.
While the information gathered by the McKenzie Family was crucial to nearly all Canadian victories, their crowning acheivement was when Stephen and Margaret had teamed up to inebriate Americans and then place them in compromising situations, to be used for blackmail against their wives. They had done this in Queenston, Upper Canada, in June, 1813, when they found out that the Americans were going to stage a surprise attack against Lt. Fitzgibbon at Beaver Dams. Heroically, the entire family jumped into a canoe and rowed all the way to Beaver Dams, where they told Fitzgibbon the Americans’ plans. Unfortunately for the McKenzies, while they were the first to arrive with the information, Chocolatier Laura Secord also came with the identical information, whose sweet truffles left a much sweeter memory for Fitzgibbon, who gave Secord the credit.
Unofficially, the government of Upper Canada made the third february of every year “McKenzie Family Day.” nearly 200 years later, the Ontario government recognized the holiday and made it statuatory for all employers who felt like following it. Unfortunately, the name McKenzie had been lost to the annals of time and bureaucracy, leaving only our time-honoured “Family Day.”
*UPDATE* Apparently there are those out there who don’t know enough Canadian history to know this is fake. So officially, I made this all up. Capiche?
WK
This entry was written by , posted on February 15, 2009 at 11:48 pm, filed under Humour and tagged Canada, Family Day, History, Holiday, Laura Secord, McKenzie, Ontario. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.