The child that was me experienced the lead-up to Easter as foreboding rather than inspiring
I was never big on Easter. As a Catholic schoolboy in 1950s Ireland, Easter played second fiddle to Christmas. In fact, the competition wasn’t even close. Christmas had several advantages. For one thing, school holidays were longer. Whereas Easter only delivered a week and a half, Christmas tacked on a further full week. The tone,…
The season of giving should remind us how to live the rest of the year
The company has gone. The tree flops sadly at the curbside. The decorations are stowed away for another year. As we resume our normal activities, the feel-good generosity and goodwill of Christmas fade. With the Salvation Army kettles out of sight, the needs of others are out of mind. Howard Thurman, an African American whose…
Accept your limitations and honour those activities that make you feel good when you do them
If you’re struggling with the holiday season, know that you are not alone: many of us scramble with all the responsibility and the desire to get things done. The perfect gift, the perfect wrapping, the cookies, sending out cards, attending school plays, paying the bills: the list goes on and on. With all this perceived…How to avoid a Clark Griswold meltdown and having a SWAT team invade our home
National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation has become a holiday season staple in many homes. The film, released in 1989, portrays the misadventures of the Griswold family as the main character Clark tries to create the perfect family Christmas. While the film is genuinely funny, there’s something more profound that appeals to us. Perhaps it’s the fact…
Scrambling to find just the right gift for this holiday season?
If you’re still scrambling trying to find just that right particular gift for this holiday season, here’s a few practical, innovative and extremely useful gift ideas with a little wow factor. SleepPhones If your loved one likes to listen to their favourite tunes or podcasts while drifting off to sleep and standard earbuds are just…
Christmas was more primitive in the 18th and mid-19th centuries, but it was still Christmas
Turn the clock back to the late 18th century and mid-19th century Alberta, and chances are you’d be eating fish, beavertail, and stewed moose rather than roasted turkey and honey-glazed ham for Christmas dinner. Instead of rockin’ to tunes emanating from audio systems and streaming services, you’re more likely to be dancing the jig to…
It is shortsighted to restrict ourselves to a candy cane diet of Christmas cuteness
We go to extremes to avoid the religious aspects of Christmas in the public sphere, and we are worse for it. Christian beliefs about Christmas might offend someone in our secular and multicultural society, so we ignore its religious and historical background. The reluctance to mention the origins of this much-loved holiday permeates early childhood…
If we share peace and goodwill with others, we find them growing within us
Though it’s technically the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ for Christians, many traditions merge to form what we call Christmas. Some traditions are indeed Christian but others aren’t. Some date from eras before Jesus was born and some are more recent. One of the most endearing today is that of Santa Claus, the…
How something quite ordinary can be transformed by a specific performance
In late 1965, coming to Canada from Ireland had its revelations. My Dublin hometown may have been more architecturally distinguished, but it couldn’t match Toronto’s relative abundance of decently paying jobs. There were also things like diners – which I’d only seen in American movies – and the language esoterica pertaining to “double-double” coffees. Top…The Christmas tree is a universal symbol that delivers a message of endurance and light during the dark winter months
The traditional German song O Tannenbaum is often translated as O Christmas Tree. This translation is only partly accurate, however. The English version is quite different from the German: the essence of the German song is far more universal. One of the beauties of learning languages is discovering what words and poetry mean to those…