#apologetic Canadian worms all trying hard to stay out of your way

[microsuedemouse]

Yes mom please tell us your favourite Canadian David Headcanons Like I, the mere European, have no clue about Canada at all but I'd gladly embrace all of your Headcanons 😄😄

oh boy okay you asked for it pal

(for the record: you may consider all of this as canon to Run Away Home, and I will tag it as such, but you may also adopt these for your own use if you wish! lmk though, I’d love to know which ones y’all like!)

in RAH I’ve been headcanoning David as coming from Hamilton for simplicity’s sake - it’s where I live. let’s go deeper: when I was six my town and in fact the whole county of Flamborough was amalgamated into the city of Hamilton. much of Flamborough remains relatively rural. so:

David’s mom lives in a nice suburb somewhere and he grew up there on the edge between urban and rural areas, knowing people from both (okay so this is just my life shut up)

His grandmother and grandfather, though, owned a small farm out in the more rural area and he spent a lot of time there as a kid, especially in the summers.

he went to college at Mohawk and got an apartment in the city… this is truly just my RAH-specific background but here we are so why not share

He loves Hamilton’s art community and its nature and parks and many many waterfalls

He LOVES to go camping wherever he can, with a special fondness for Banff and Algonquin

like 80% of us, he got his first job at Tim Hortons. Unlike 80% of us, he did not utterly hate it and can even still eat the food.

he grew up watching a lot of American TV/consuming American media, like the rest of us, but he also loved the fundamental Canadian stuff - Fred Penner’s Place and Crazy Quilt and Mr. Dressup and Big Comfy Couch were all major childhood staples alongside things like Mr. Rogers. Like all of us, he cried when Mr. Dressup passed away and still has weird random memories of Nanalan’ that he doesn’t think he could explain if he tried. He owned all of Fred Penner’s albums as a kid and will still buy new ones, and see him live any chance he gets, because Fred Penner is a national treasure. (He has tried teaching Fred Penner songs at camp, but for some reason the kids never seem to be into it.)

when he outgrew little-kids’ TV he still watched a lot of Teletoon and Family Channel stuff. He’s seen all of 6Teen.

his coffee order is a double double (two creams, two sugars).

he unironically dresses like a Canadian pretty often - flannels and the good ol’ Canadian tuxedo (denim jacket worn with jeans) are totally normal to his wardrobe.

he learned to drive a tractor before a car.

Gwen is surprised and delighted when he tells her he’s been drinking since he was nineteen, and then she’s disappointed when he points out that’s legal drinking age in Ontario.

he normally drinks ciders (not especially Canadian but just my hc lol), but he does like a good Caesar or Canadian whiskey (he just calls it rye).

also: he learned how to open two capped bottles with each other’s necks (no bottle opener) at a bush party once. he likes that this information shocks Gwen and decides not to tell her that he ended up there because he absolutely misunderstood what a ‘bush party’ entailed.

(admittedly all of these drinking headcanons come out of a fic I started and haven’t gotten around to finishing. idk when I will so I’ll go ahead and share here)

he doesn’t love winter but it takes at least 40 cm (~16 in) of snow and/or a windchill of -30°C (-22°F) or lower to stop him from going about his day.

as I noted in that other post, he loves Letterkenny because it’s just so damn accurate - he’s known so many people like the characters in the show! It’s definitely cruder than he’d like and he’d die of embarrassment if the campers or someone found out how much he loves it, but it’s just so funny. (what he doesn’t realise is that no one at Camp Campbell would be able to make full sense of the show.)

he also loves a good Rick Mercer Rant

he’s enjoyed his fair share of Corner Gas, and some Trailer Park Boys, too.

He loves Murdoch Mysteries and got a kick out of Republic of Doyle as well.

He’s read all of the Anne of Green Gables books and grew up watching the cartoon often. He still gets emotional when he thinks too much about Anne and Gilbert.

Canadian music, MY DUDES. He loves the Barenaked Ladies, Great Big Sea and anything involving Alan Doyle, the Arkells (he’s from Hamilton, it’s basically required), Lights, Alanis Morissette, The Tragically Hip, I could go on….

like literally the rest of the country, he watched the televised final concert of the Hip - it was in August 2016, so he was still at camp and had to watch an online stream that wavered in quality, and then he watched a recording again when he got back home - and cried his eyes out at the end.

He’s been to every province at least briefly, but never to the territories - they’re next on his travel list. Canada is huge and beautiful and he wants to see as much of it as he can!

he speaks pretty decent conversational French, but gets really nervous when he messes up or forgets a word, and the more nervous he is the worse he gets. it snowballs and often ends in him panicking.

he’s a very, very bad skater and absolutely useless at hockey. he’s okay at lacrosse and downhill skiing. he can handle cross-country skiing or snowshoeing pretty well, though!

and he spent every winter tobogganing down local hills. okay, he still spends every winter tobogganing down local hills, even after it was outlawed. no one pays attention to that law.

he LOVES maple syrup. and maple taffy. and maple cookies. and everything else maple. he and his mom have been tapping the trees on her property every year for as long as he can remember.

he wouldn’t tell you he cares much about sports, but if you insult the Leafs, the Blue Jays, the Argos, the Habs, or the Ti-Cats, he gets suddenly and irrationally defensive. he barely follows the games so he doesn’t even know why he gets so defensive.

(if pushed, Ti-Cats over Argos, and Leafs over Habs, even though being a Leafs fan is outrageously depressing.)

He would probably take a bullet for Wayne Gretzky. Again, he doesn’t know why. He just would.

On the note of Gretzky: you know the little cheers that kids add to the lyrics of ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’? After the line “you’ll go down in history,” many American kids add “like George Washington!” Like other Canadian kids, David says, “like Wayne Gretzky!”

He has been known to compulsively start singing “Don’t you put it in your mouth” when trying to stop campers from putting shit in their mouths.

He has also been known to remind kids to “stay alert, stay safe!”

He also still wants a house hippo. Damn it. We all still want a house hippo…

in general he makes a lot of references to Canadian ads that we all remember vividly but no one outside of the country knows about. “MoooOOOM, Aidan cut me in HALF again!”

if presented with enough rocks he will just start building inukshuks. sometimes he does this at camp and the kids wonder what the fuck these weird rock structures are.

his wallet is still full of Canadian Tire money. they have points cards now. and yet he can still never get rid of the Canadian Tire money. it is eternal

he has a rim roller on his keychain. once Max asked what it was and David only sighed deeply. “another free coffee…” he said distantly

he, like most of us, has a very love-hate relationship with Toronto.

he calls it T.O. or T-dot, usually.

one time he was talking to an American who goes to Toronto sometimes for business, and they made a passing comment about Union Station. David’s eye began to twitch.

He learned to drop his ‘eh’s while in the states when he was still a camper, because other campers used to make jokes about it sometimes. they slide right back into his vocabulary the moment he gets home.

he still pronounces ‘roof’ in a way that strikes the kids as weird, and still uses Canadian spellings most of the time - colour instead of color, grey instead of gray, etc.

the boy loves ketchup chips. and all-dressed chips. and poutine. and back bacon. and aero bars, and kinder eggs, and actual smarties. I could go on.

I just scrolled up and saw how long this list has gotten so I… I will stop. but oh my god, I could go on forever, probably. Canadian David is good shit. I will be your Canadian David consultant if you want.