The Queen's Official Birthday (King's Official Birthday in the reign of a male monarch) is the selected day on which the birthday of the monarch of the Commonwealth realms (currently Queen Elizabeth II) is officially celebrated in those countries. The date varies as adopted by each Commonwealth country, but is generally around the end of May to the start of June, to coincide with a high probability of fine weather in the Northern Hemisphere for outdoor ceremonies.
The sovereign's birthday was first officially marked in the United Kingdom in 1748. Since then, the date of the king or queen's birthday has been determined throughout the British Empire and later the Commonwealth according to either different royal proclamations issued by the sovereign or governor or by statute laws passed by the local parliament. The exact date of the celebration today varies from country to country and except by coincidence does not fall on the day of the monarch's actual birthday (that of the present monarch being 21 April). In some cases, it is an official public holiday, sometimes coinciding with the celebration of other events. Most Commonwealth realms release a Birthday Honours List at this time.
Read more about Queen's Official Birthday: Australia, Canada, Fiji, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Other Countries and Territories
Famous quotes containing the words queen, official and/or birthday:
“Most Gracious Queen, we thee implore
To go away and sin no more,
But if that effort be too great,
To go away at any rate.”
—Anonymous. “On Queen Caroline,” in Diary and Correspondence of Lord Colchester (1861)
“We were that generation called “silent,” but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the period’s official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man’s fate.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1935)
“Washington’s birthday is as close to a secular Christmas as any Christian country dare come this side of blasphemy.”
—Alistair Cooke (b. 1908)