Happy Birthday Canada

Canada turns 142 years old today and I know we’re a few years away from a full-blown sesquicentennial birthday bash, but still, a Nationwide birthday is worth celebrating, no? We live in a country with the best coffee in the world (mmm, Tim Horton’s) and are able to buy beer cases with handles big enough to fit a fully gloved hand. Clearly, we rock. So, in honour of our Canadian heritage, I’ve found a few fabulous facts about our country that are totally toast-worthy for any July 1st celebrations. Oh, and if you see Joe, tell him I said Hi!

• A Canadian bull named Starbuck earned $25 million bucks over his lifetime for siring 200,000 dairy cows. And after he died in 1998, his frozen sperm still fetches $250 a pop. Uh, no pun intended.
• Reader’s Digest just named David Suzuki the most trustworthy Canadian.
• Canada is the only country that uses a humidex scale to better reflect how the perceived temperature feels to the average person. Incidentally, the highest humidex reading ever occurred was on July 25th, 2007 in Carman, Manitoba when temperatures soared to 53 degrees Celsius.
• I always thought the highest mountains in Canada were in Alberta but in actual fact, the tallest mountains are located in the Yukon with Mt. Logan’s peak towering 5959 meters high. The tallest mountain in Alberta is Mt. Columbia whose peak stretches 3747 meters high.
• More dinosaur bones have been found in Canada than any other country.
• Baffin Island in the territory of Nunavut is Canada’s largest island. At 507,451 square kilometers it’s large enough to fit all of the United Kingdom, Ireland, Austria and Hungary with room to spare.
• Half of $10.00 is worth $5.00. Swear to god I'm not trying to be facetious. If you happen to find a torn half of a $10.00 bill, it’s still worth $5.00. And as long as a bill is at least three-fifths of its original size, it maintains its full monetary value.
• If we took all the land in Canada and divided it equally among Canadians, we’d each been sitting pretty on about 95 acres of land.
• Thomas Edison actually just bought the patent for the light bulb. It was technically two men from Toronto, Mathew Evans and Henry Woodward, who invented the light bulb long before Thomas Edison did, but their idea failed to impress investors because they thought it would be too costly.
• An average of one tornado a day is reported during the summer in Canada. In the United States, an average of five tornadoes is reported every day.
• Estevan Saskatchewan is the sunshine capital of Canada with the clearest skies year round and highest number of hours of sunshine per year.
• Yellowknife is the city with the coldest winters with an average overnight temperature during the winter months of -29.9 degrees Celsius.
• Kamloops is the city with the warmest summers with an average daytime temperature during the summer months of of 27.2 degrees Celsius.

*** Whether you’re celebrating our nation’s birthday with a family picnic or barbecue followed by some fireworks at dusk, or just enjoying the national holiday with a relaxing day off, have a Happy Canada Day my fellow Canadians. This is an original post to Canada Moms Blog. Karla Cadeau also writes on her personal blog Untangling Knots.