Make Christmas 2020 important for good reason
Remember the past and start a tradition, Jamie Lamb says.
A whole whack of Christmas traditions will be jettisoned this year because of COVID-19, as if we needed more reason to hunker down and beat this damned disease.
Some of these Christmas traditions will be let go because they are simply too expensive for those with earnings affected by their pandemic employment status. Most of the coming abandonments, however, have to do with us not seeing family and friends, dropping the tradition of having people come by for Christmas, or you leaving home to visit someone for Christmas.
The person-to-person and the face-to-face have always been at the heart of our Christmases. It has always been about the people we “see” over Christmas. People we'll have a drink with, share food with, speak with in a store, give a hug to on the street.
With COVID-19 stealing all that from us, it plainly makes for a lonelier, colder Christmas. So it's worth each of us taking a moment to think about what won't be happening with us at Christmas this year — and recognize why it's important to you and why you'll miss it.
What I'll miss most is the beer and 20 pizzas I order on Christmas Eve.
This tradition of beer and pizza began many years ago when there were two young and talented and remarkably handsome men writing columns for The Vancouver Sun. Their names were Pete Mcmartin and Jamie Lamb. One Christmas Eve, the two of them faced a problem. Their young and beautiful wives worked jobs that required them to work on Christmas Eve, meaning the two dashing writers would be responsible for the care of their total of five tender young children on this special evening.
Never fear. Our heroes knew just how to surmount the challenge. They plunked the five kids down in front of a television set showing old BBC Christmas shows, fed them takeout pizza, and then retired to the living room with beer and cider to congratulate themselves on their fine fathering ways.
It was a great success. So much so that they did it again the next year. And the next. Even when the spouses no longer worked Christmas Eve, the tradition of beer and pizza continued, in part because the spouses saw the advantage of minimal cleanup with bottles and pizza boxes going into the recycling and everything else in the compost or garbage. It was a welcome calm before the heavy cooking and cleaning of the next day.
The kids now have their own spouses and their own children and the Christmas Eve pizza party expanded to include grandmothers and neighbours and ... ah, well, it brings a tear just to remember it in this pandemic year.
It is also provides a reminder of what my family did on Christmas Eve when I was a child in the Cenozoic era.
We would read aloud.
When I was very young, it was just A Visit from St. Nicholas, by Clement C. Moore, illustrations by Everett Shinn. You can't beat The Night Before Christmas, as it's called today, and Shinn's paintings made the house — with its sleeping mice in matchboxes — as cosy as Christmas should be. My father gradually added Dickens and Dylan Thomas, and then we'd hang our stockings over the fireplace, my mother would put out the glass of milk and the oatmeal cookie, and we would retire, happy as Christmas clams.
In my adult years, my wife and I have sometimes hosted a “read-aloud” party whereby friends would come by and bring their favourite passages from books and poems and they would read them aloud.
I learned an important lesson. You are what you choose to read aloud to others.
This Christmas, I encourage you to read something you love to the people you love.
It can be an excerpt from a favourite book, a poem, a religious text, something you once wrote, or some bantering dialogue from an old Archie comic. The subject isn't important. What's important is that it matters to you. If you do this, I guarantee your family or the close friends you read it to — and especially your children — will remember it for the rest of their lives.
If you'd prefer someone else to do the reading, B.C. authors Joy Davis, Bill Richardson, Jack Knox, Renee Sarojini Saklikar, Alicia Tobin and I will come to your home and read some of our Christmas stories and poems in a one-hour Zoom session on Saturday, Dec. 5 at 7 p.m. You can watch and listen live to this free community event — A West Coast Read-aloud Christmas at a west coast read aloud christmas. eventbrite.ca or as a recording at the same site any time after Dec. 5.