Little Big Things

I don't know about you, but I find it easy to take for granted just how widespread Christmas is as a holiday. There are websites and infographics devoted entirely to how it is celebrated all over the world: the music, the food, the specific person who brings presents to the good children or punishment to the bad. Even places and cultures that were not historically Christian - nor subject to widespread European colonization - seem to have gotten in on the action by now. And nowhere is that clearer, I think, than in global versions of the Nativity . Every year, for instance, the National Cathedral in Washington D.C. puts together a curated display of just some of its hundreds of crèches - figurines depicting the Nativity scene - from all around the world. And while many of these sets have the conventional figures and features many of us will have come to expect, others offer a more culturally-specific rendition, with subtle changes to the characters' faces, dress, or belongings

To be honest, I've always had a complex relationship with Remembrance Day. In my head, in a purely intellectual sense, I know that it falls every year on November 11, the anniversary of the official end of WWI, and is meant to be a time of reflection and thankfulness for the servicemen and -women who have fought and died for our country. I also know it to be a time when we pause to reflect on the continued physical, emotional, social and financial needs of our veterans, the oldest of whom have been hit particularly hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, if you were to ask me if that knowledge in my head ever made it down to my heart...hard to say. I suppose there were moments when it must have: like when I finally discovered, as a Grade 8 student, that Canadian forces were deployed in an attempt to defend Hong Kong from the Imperial Japanese during WWII ; or when the brother of a close friend I had in university was a soldier who could potentially be deployed to Afghanistan. But w