Happy Holidays To You All

It’s Christmas Eve. The air is cold and the west wind is blowing, but there is no snow is the forecast. The presents are all wrapped up in their re-usable cloth bags under the pencil thin Christmas tree in the dining room.

A good part of the day will be spent making stuff to bring to my son’s house in Toronto tomorrow. But this evening, there really won’t be that much to to. So we make take a drive over to St Davids to gawk at one of those lavishly decorated McMansions on York Road and finally watch together the Hallmark movie that I so foolishly promised to watch with Heather.

I have always liked this time of year. Not for all the crazy running around you have to do to make sure you’ve got something great for everyone. Or all the extra food shopping you have to do. (It’s really hard to find turkey cooking trays and good green beans on Christmas Eve).

No, what I like is the feeling that Christmas gives you. It a warm cozy feeling; a feeling like, no matter what happened up to this point, the whole world stops and takes a breath and maybe just for one day, forgets all the crap and just exercises the sacred human right to eat drink and be merry.

I often think back to the Christmases we used to have when the kids were small and there really wasn’t a ton of money. I also think back to the Christmases when I was a kid and Christmas meant huge family gatherings.

I was going through some of my old columns and found this piece, which is an excerpt from a Couch Potato Chronicles post I wrote in 2001, the year we got blasted like crazy with White Christmas and pretty much the last year we were all living together.  It sums up my feelings about Christmas just as well as anything I could write today.

And A Partridge In A Pear Tree...Yadda Yadda

We’re having the worst snow storm of the season so far as I sit here and write these words. I’ve shoveled twice and will doubtless be shoveling more.

According to The Weather Channel, this storm is called a Colorado Low. Not very creative but I have always liked the word Colorado. It forms in the lee of the Rockies and blows straight from there to Newfoundland. It’s after eleven and the sky outside my window is an iridescent greyish orange.

When you look up into the trees, away from the neighbouring houses and pretty lights, there’s a timelessness to the way the barren branches blow around in a seemingly aimless pattern. The cold feels even colder when you look into that grey-orange sky. There’s a great deal of solace in knowing you’re fortunate enough not to have to be out in weather like this. Its more than enough to make you count your blessings.

Because Christmas comes on a Monday this year, this is my official Christmas column. I usually don’t write this column until Thursday or Friday. Maybe it’s the Colorado Low that’s put me in the mood. Or maybe it’s just the fact that the later I stay up and shovel snow, the easier it will be to dig myself out in the morning, when I have to go to a meeting at some hotel up in the north part of the city.

This past Saturday, Heather and I listened to The Vinyl Cafe on CBC radio and it filled us both with a real sense of Christmas.

It also gave me something of an insight into the nature of Christmas itself. Stuart McLean, the host of The Vinyl Cafe is a brilliant Canadian writer, and during the show he read a couple of his stories.

One about his first Christmas away from home and the other about this family he invented who live somewhere in the suburbs of Oshawa, Ontario. These stories were both quite moving in the simplicity of their prose and the honest delivery of the reader.

They make you conjure up in your own mind, memories of Christmases past, and the potent combination of well written pieces of Canadiana and the images that came dancing though my head, brought tears of nostalgic joy to my eyes.

Mine happened to take me back to the time when I was about eleven or twelve and our rather gigantic family would gather at our house in Fort Dreary for the holidays. They would travel from as far away as New Jersey, California and Vancouver just to sit around and drink egg nog and Coca Cola laced with Canadian Club and remind you how big you were getting.

In my memories, it wasn’t about the opening of presents on Christmas day although one year, my Uncle Harold, who was the building superintendent of the Empire State Building, brought me a burgundy coloured Schwinn roadster with balloon tires and hand brakes. I loved that bike with a passion that would be considered kinky in most civilized countries.

No, Christmas back then was really all about having people around you whom you knew and loved and felt really safe with.

It was about shooting the breeze over nothing at all and singing along with Bing Crosby’s ultra mellow version of White Christmas and watching your dad carve the big turkey while your uncles all told off colour jokes and your aunts would give them a whack for their trouble.

It was about sitting around with your cousin Tony, who was a sailor in the merchant marine, and hearing stories of all the great ports of call he visited. It was about learning to play poker with your cousin Pete and losing the ten dollars your Aunt Frannie gave you in the process.

It was about going to Ineson’s store and picking up eggs for the home-made eggnog your aunts took turn whipping up. Mrs. Ineson would give you a mug of hot chocolate to drink and a cookie to munch on . Everybody who came into the store took a few minutes out of their busy Christmas Eve day to have a pleasant chat and exchange seasons greetings. It was about your cousin Lynn, the grade 6 teacher, who would gather all the young kids around on the living room floor and read Christmas stories in that enchanted voice that really good teachers all seem to have.

If you close your eyes for a moment, at any time around Christmas, these memories can flood back into your own consciousness, with no more stimulation than the smell of a Scottish pine tree or sound of Christmas carol in some store. And it will probably occur to you as it did to me listening to Stuart McLean, that Christmas in the present is mostly about Christmas in the past.

As I grow older, my memories move along in time. But they are always there. And besides being with my loved ones, they are the very best part of Christmas for me. The tiny perfect part that remains undisturbed by all the commotion and distraction which typically surrounds the holiday season.

I wish you all the happiest of holidays and all the joy the season has to offer. Get a little rest and relaxation. You’ve earned it. And we've got a lot of work to do next year to get the world back to a place where there actually are many more Christmases to come.