A Child's Christmas in Canada

this cold snowy night, seated here beside the Christmas tree my son and I decorated together, its lights cheery against the darkest coldest time of year. On the weekend, we went out to a nearby tree farm where they provided us with a saw and told us we could cut our own tree from the collection of snow-laden spruce and fir lined up there, seemingly waiting and watching. We had hot chocolate, warmed our stinging red hands through mitts by the bonfire and went on a horse-drawn sleighride through the trees.

The smell of the balsam fir tree now wafts through our living room. The temperature has plummeted to minus twenty degrees and colder; outside is crisp and clean with sharp slivers of crystal suspended in the air. A strong wind blows directly from the wild lands north of here telling us this old world of ours is still capable of powerful force which still stretches far beyond our reach and control.

Our Italian neighbour's crystal earrings sparkled by the Christmas tree as she sipped her wine in our living room last night.

Christmas around Prince George and BC's northen interior dwells in log cabins, woodstoves, forests, horse drawn sleigh rides under thick woolen blankets, sparkling snow, red-cheeked children skating on lake surface rinks and the sharp lines of cross country ski trails disappearing through the snow-laden forests spread out before us. The midday sun pauses low in the sky, brightening the landscape, not quite penetrating the chill. The magic of a northern Canadian Christmas. I want my son to experience these cozy magical Canadian phenomena for his whole life.

In recent months, Canadian politicians have traveled the globe trying to sell our country as an exporter of the black dirty fuels that are driving humans and much of the world to the brink of oblivion: coal and crude oil. We have the resources, you have the knowledge, they tell other parts of the world. Our black smudge soul reaching out to the world as we become something we never were, and the land is a place for resource exploitation rather than a precious home as it once was. Every branch and leaf is sacred, so too the passing breezes that blow through.

The federal government-appointed review panel has also been announced for the oil and condensate twin pipelines a major oil pipeline company wants to put through here, on its journey from the Alberta tar sands to the Kitimat coast. The Canadian government has plans to expand Canada's oil market to Asia and we stand right on the route of them being able to do so. The tar sands' ugliness begins to creep this way.

First Nations people have already decried the process, and the vice chief of the local tribal council traveled to the climate talks in Copenhagen to talk about the pipeline, the concerns about the tar sands and how his people's Aboriginal rights have been ignored. The pipeline would cross a thousand rivers and streams between Alberta and the coast, and one of them is the Stuart River, a major tributary of the Nechako River that flows into the Fraser here in Prince George.

I grew up on the banks of the Nechako River, and the cheery chatting but haunting call of the geese migrating through shadowed my childhood years. The calendar's months marked by the passing of the geese.

And I have traveled along the Nechako River's banks on the historic train route headed west. From the train I have watched the white trumpeter swans gracefully swimming there, at peace, completely oblivious of the dark oily stain of spills that would threaten them from upstream. Swans are of the ethereal realm of angel hymns sung by warm candle glow somewhere in the midst of this sparkling-moon snow-tucked hushed wild land that still despite what dark industrial threats may lurk, remains magical and mysterious. This land holds a gentle power that only the most patient observers fully come to understand.

The churches last Sunday rang their bells through the crisp sharp air 350 times for Copenhagen. 350 parts per million, the safe level of carbon into the atmosphere. Church bells rising into this same air, speaking to carbon of hope, of people's hope for a bright shiny new world.

The thermostat read minus 30 earlier today, minus 40 with the windchill. We are in northern Canada, in our down jackets and Canadian-made Baffin boots.

It is where we want to stay.

The other night we went downtown together to get library books. Outside the city had put up Christmas lights which cast a warm glow across the snow and ice of the downtown courtyard. My son is drawn to these cheery lights. We imagine these lights are the magical lights of Santa's home far north at the North Pole. Indeed the trees in the surrounding hills and stretching up to nearby Connaught Hill where the City has erected a Christmas lights display twinkle with ice crystals and a haunting white layer of hoar frost.

When it starts to snow, a perfectly formed snowflake lands on my black glove. I remember as a child letting the snowflakes land on my gloves, and studying many of them, one by one, as they landed, each in a beautifully formed unique pattern. I show the snowflake patterns to my son, and we look up, the falling snow tickling our faces as it falls from high above, from that mysterious place of air that has become so complicated and yet remains so simple.

I do not ever want to lose these northern snowflakes. I do not want them to be replaced by distorted ice blobs or driving sleet of global warming. I will fight for the perfectly formed snowflakes and fluffy northern snow.

In my Christmas dream, my young son is pretending to be a Christmas elf skiing through the snow, heading across the magic lands of the North Pole. He has entered this special land that only children can visit because they dwell where magic is still possible everywhere. He tells me about the other elves he spots, those figures darting into the Prince George Civic Centre for a meeting. Those figures entering Santa's home to create the toys for the children. Later he will sit on Santa's knee by the old trains at the Prince George Railway Museum and tell him he will leave chocolate chip cookies out for him. He will tell Santa about the toy he wants.

Toys that will not hurt the environment with their plastic and styrofoam wrap and mass production waste because they are made instead by elves in a magic land where there is no such thing as waste and pollution. They make the toys far beyond the place where the polar bears now slip through the sea ice into the vast waters of the Arctic Ocean.

Somewhere up there, high above the spruce trees and snow and polar bears' caves, the magical north pole still needs to exist. Santa lives in Canada with the postal code HO HO HO. This northern magic is a legacy we offer to the world, more valuable than any crude oil we could ever hope to export.

And a Merry Christmas still rings out from the mysterious vast snowy lands of northern Canada.