O holy night!

From Shaman’s Rock

By Jim Poling Sr. 

My most cherished Christmas moment comes when I sit quietly and recall the Christmas Eve when I heard an angel sing.

Fresh-fallen snow protested beneath my gumboots breaking trail down the unploughed lane as I walked home that Christmas Eve. Dry, sharp squeaks, not unlike the cries of cheap chalk scrapped against too clean a blackboard. 

Skuur-eek, skuur-eek. 

The boots ignored the sounds. They moved on, ribbed rubber bottoms and laced high leather tops creating a meandering wake in the ankle-deep snow. 

From each side of the lane, drifted snow leaned tiredly against the backsides of the bungalows, dropped there by an impatient blizzard just passed through. Their crests were indistinguishable against the white stucco walls but nearly reached tufted piles of fluffy snow clinging nervously to windowsills and eavestrough lips. 

The squeaks flew through the still night air, dodging fat snowflakes that fell heavily onto my cap bill, occasionally splashing into my face, flushed warm from the walk. 

Faint strains of music joined the squeaking as I approached our back fence. I stopped to hear the music more clearly, now identifiable as singing voices escaping through an open window. 

I shuffled forward and listened to the notes float out crisply and clearly, then mingle with smoke rising from the chimneys. Notes and smoke rose together into an icy sky illuminated by frost crystals set shimmering by thousands of stars and a frosted moon. 

The music was the Christmas carol ‘O Holy Night,’ and the notes came from the window in my grandmother’s room. It was open to the cold because most people smoked cigarettes back then and cracked a window at gatherings to thin the smoke. They sang the first verse, and, when they reached the seventh line, the other voices ceased and a single voice carried on alone: 

“Fall on your knees! Oh, hear the angel voices! O Niiii ... iiight Diii...vine! ...” 

That’s the part where the voice rises higher and higher until the singer reaches a stratospheric note. 

The solo voice belonged to Louise LaFrance, my grandmother, and I knew she was hitting that high note while sitting on the edge of the bed that had been her prison for sixteen years. She was crippled with limb-twisting rheumatoid arthritis and suffered searing pain and the humiliation of being bedridden, a humiliation that included needing a bedpan to relieve herself and having her son-in-law lift her naked body in and out of the bathtub. 

She had taken up smoking to help ease the pain but had trouble holding a cigarette between her gnarled fingers. 

She never complained or questioned why she had to bear the pain, and despite her frailty, she was a leader in our house. We brought our problems to her. When we hurt, we ran to her and she draped her twisted arms around us and absorbed our pain because she believed it was better that she have it than us. 

The others had stopped singing to listen to her. A shiver danced on my spine the second time she hit the high notes at the words “O Night Divine,”. 

When she finished singing “O Holy Night,” the other voices started up again, this time with “Silent Night” and other favourite carols. 

I went into the house and found Christmas Eve celebrants — my mom, dad, and some neighbours — crowded into the ten-by-ten bedroom that was my grandmother’s world. They sang long into the night, mostly in French because the neighbours were the Gauthiers who seldom spoke English to my grandmother and my mother. 

After the singing ended my mother served tourtière, which I slathered with mustard and devoured as only a teenager can. Then we gathered at the tree and opened our gifts. 

I have long forgotten what I got, and it doesn’t matter, because my real gift was the understanding that those high notes were not solely the products of my grandmother’s lungs. They came from a strength far beyond anything that mere human flesh can produce. They were high notes driven by something far stronger — an unbreakable spirit. 

It was my grandmother’s last Christmas. But the memory of her high notes and unbreakable spirit brings her back every Christmas Eve.

Read From Shaman’s Rock: www.mindentimes.ca/columns

 It’s time to hike out to the shed and fetch the artificial Christmas tree.

It is not a huge task. Wrestle the box off the top shelf, pull out the three tree sections, snap them together, straighten the stand legs and stick the tree in a corner. The lights are built into the tree so you just plug the cord into a wall socket, add some Christmassy decorations, toss on some tinsel, and voila! All done.

But I’ve been thinking that maybe that’s not such a good idea this year. Memories of Christmases past keep whispering in my head.

They remind me of joyous Christmas moments from the past. Those years when we went into the bush with Dad to select and cut the world’s best Christmas tree. The fun of dragging it home, setting it up, then placing every coloured ball, and each piece of tinsel, carefully and affectionately. 

And, in later years, following many of the same family traditions with our own children.

More people are leaving their artificial trees in storage this year. They are opting for real trees, in many cases because they are seeking some normalcy in a year that has been completely abnormal.

The Canadian Christmas Tree Growers Association says it expects this year to set a record for sales. Many Canadian Christmas tree lots have sold out and exports of real trees to the U.S. are soaring.

I decided some years back not to cut any more live Christmas trees because of environmental concerns. I’m wondering now if those concerns are well-founded.

Like most artificial trees, ours is mainly plastic. The needles are plastic, as are many of the connecting parts. The electrical wires are plastic as is the star that tops the tree. 

I’ve concluded that by deciding on an artificial tree I traded one set of environmental concerns for another. 

There is too much plastic in our world. It is everywhere, including places it should not be – roadside ditches, city streets, lake shorelines and oceans. Plastics take centuries to deteriorate. Some never do.

Real Christmas trees disappear soon after Christmas. Many municipalities have Christmas tree recycling programs in which the trees are ground into mulch that is added to gardens to lock in moisture, suppress weeds and feed the soil.

Live trees suck up carbon dioxide belched into the atmosphere by human use of fossil fuels. They are pollution filters that researchers say can remove up to 13 tons of airborne pollutants per acre per year. 

And, they release oxygen year round - especially the young hungry and fast-growing evergreens - because they do not shed their needles, which are food-producing factories.

Growing Christmas trees for sale also is a boost for the agriculture industry. Statistics Canada reports that the value of farm cash receipts for Christmas trees in 2017 was $91.2 million.           

Also, when you get a tree from a Christmas tree lot you expect that tree is going to be replaced. Tree farmers must replace trees that are cut and sold if they expect to stay in business in future years.

A tree farm sapling takes eight to 10 years before it is ready for market, so it’s a business in which the operator must think ahead.

Perhaps all of us should adopt such forward thinking. What if those of us who follow the Christmas tree tradition planted one replacement tree every year as a sign of renewed life? 

All trees, but evergreens in particular, are a sign of continuing life. Ancient civilizations hung evergreen boughs over their doors and windows during bleak winter times. The ancient Egyptians brought green palm branches into their homes in late December as a sign of life.

Some Christmas tree traditions and customs have been borrowed from different people from different lands. The first Christmas tree in Canada is believed have been introduced by Baron Friederick von Riedesel, a German immigrant to Quebec in the late 1700s.

Originally the Christmas tree was the traditional centrepiece of the season celebrating the birth of Christ. It has expanded to become a symbol of freshness, renewed life, hope and faith. 

That’s a much-needed, much-appreciated gift in 2020, a year of loss and sadness.

 Read From Shaman’s Rock: www.mindentimes.ca/columns

One delight of living in Vancouver many years ago was dinner at the On On restaurant in Chinatown. 

The food was fabulous and plentiful, and sometimes we walked it off with a stroll through the Downtown Eastside, now referred to as the DTES. 

The DTES was scummy back then; strewn with druggies, drunks, the mentally ill and people just down on their luck. Giving our kids a glimpse of the DTES after an On On outing was a lesson in what they did not want to be, and where they did not want to end up, when they grew up. 

To me, the Downtown Eastside was another slum soon to be cleaned up; transfigured by good government and a society that cared about people who needed help. 

What a stupid assumption! Today, so many years later, there has been no cleanup. The place is worse than it ever was. 

DTES now is the poorest, most wretched neighbourhood in Canada. There probably are not many more dreadful places anywhere on the planet, and that’s saying something. 

Here’s one example of the depravity we Canadians allow to exist, and grow, in a section of our own country: 

The example is a video, posted on Facebook and now in the hands of Vancouver police, showing a woman being raped in broad daylight on the sidewalk of a DTES main intersection. It shows the woman with her legs in the air as a bare-chested man (blanket or sleeping bag covering his lower body) rapes her while bystanders watch. 

The story of the video rape was made public by Daphne Bramham, a Vancouver Sun journalist and a former colleague of mine. Her story also tells of reports of women being held hostage, raped, brutalized and even shot in a DTES homeless camp. 

Many other stories have been written about DTES depravities and conditions over the years. They have noted that the median annual income of the DTES population is $13,600, compared with $47,200 for Vancouver as a whole. 

Also, DTES residents living in SROs (Single Occupancy Rooms) are eight times more likely to die than the national average. And, the vast majority of SROs have been found to have bedbugs, cockroaches and fire code violations. 

The sub-human conditions of Vancouver’s DTES have not escaped international attention. 

Back in 2011, the New York Times described the area as: "a shock even to someone familiar with the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1980s or the Tenderloin in San Francisco." 

“Just be careful not to stray too far south of Gastown into the city’s notoriously squalid and poverty-stricken notorious Downtown Eastside, where drugs and prostitution are rampant,” the Daily News of Egypt wrote back in 2010 as Vancouver invited the world to the Winter Olympics. 

Last August the Vancouver Courier wrote about tourists from cruise ships being afraid to visit the Downtown Eastside. A German couple hurrying out of the area said their son saw discarded needles on the sidewalk and was afraid of stepping on one. 

Even celebrities have commented with disgust on the DTES. 

Rapper Snoop Dog went on Instagram back in 2016 to call the DTES ‘Terrible.” 

“You need to clean this up,” he said. 

A few months back, former Toronto Raptor Danny Green called East Hastings Street in the DTES the “worst street in North America, in terms of druggies.”  That was after two of his bags were robbed during a charity fund-raising trip to the city. 

Some travel websites, including smartertravel.com, have warned travellers to avoid parts of the Vancouver Downtown Eastside. 

Why do we allow this situation to exist? Vancouver is a wonderful city, a terrific place to live and a place for all Canadians to take pride in. Yet a good chunk of its core is a human hellhole many of us choose to ignore. 

Its underlying problems are complex. Possible solutions are complicated and controversial, but governments, politicians and social agencies have had decades to find them and clear up what amounts to a national scandal. 

Writer Daphne Bramham sums it up in her recent column on the DTES: 

“On Vancouver’s drug-addled Downtown Eastside, chaos and depravity have become so normalized that there is no humanity left.” 

No humanity left. How can Canadians let this continue? 

 Read From Shaman’s Rock: www.mindentimes.ca/columns

Size doesn't matter

The next time someone calls you a bird brain, take it as a compliment. That’s become a cliché as scientists discover more evidence that birds are smarter than we believe.

Birds do have small brains, larger ones the size of a walnut, the smaller ones perhaps smaller than an unshelled peanut. In comparison, the brains of some monkeys are the size of a lemon.

Scientists have discovered, however, that size really doesn’t matter.

Bird brains are wired differently than those of other creatures. They have more cells packed into a smaller space and higher brain neuron counts than mammals or primates.

Neurons transmit information between different parts of the brain and between the brain and the nervous system.

One 2019 study showed that ravens process visual information faster than humans. In the study, ravens took only half as long as humans to glance at a collection of objects and pick one that they wanted.

I didn’t need an elaborate scientific study to tell me that. A few years back I left the contents of my pants pockets, including my car keys, on a table on the cottage deck. When I returned to the deck, I saw a raven flying off with something in its beak.

I haven’t seen those keys since.

The information about the 2019 study, plus much other research, is contained in a new book by nature author Jennifer Ackerman. It is titled The Bird Way and is a follow-up to The Genius of Birds, her 2016 book highlighting new discoveries about bird intelligence.

Ackerman writes that scientific studies, and her own observations of birds around the world, have provided a better understanding of birds and their behaviours – an understanding that is pushing aside our mistaken biases and assumptions.

For instance, many of us see some birds as aggressive creatures, fighting each other for territory and for food. In fact, birds can be extremely co-operative, raising the young of other birds, and working together in hunting insects and other small prey.

Ackerman writes that birds use their voices to resolve disputes, negotiate boundaries and spread word about sources of food and danger.

The Bird Way is packed with much interesting information about the ways and intelligence of birds. Some of it makes the reader smile.

Smiles fade, however, when Ackerman notes the ominous declines in bird populations.

One 2019 study found that over the past 25 years bird populations that depend on insects for food declined 13 percent in Europe and almost 30 percent in Denmark.

Scientists also reported last year that one in four birds in Canada and the U.S. have disappeared since 1970. That’s nearly three billion birds.

Back in 2014 the Audubon Society predicted that one-half of North American birds likely will go extinct within the next 50 years. Audubon said that, despite their intelligence, birds cannot adapt to the rapid pace of environmental change created by humans.

Audubon published updated research in 2019 showing that 389 North American bird species are vulnerable to extinction because of climate change. It lists increasing climate-related hazards as debilitating heat waves, increased wildfires, heavy rains and rising sea levels.

Audubon is not alone in its dire predictions. BirdLife International reported in its State of the World’s Birds 2018 that 40 per cent of the planet’s 11,000 bird species are in decline. It said one in eight is threatened with global extinction.

Audubon has said that holding global warming to 1.5 Celsius above pre-industrial levels would mean about 150 bird species would no longer be vulnerable to extinction. And, 76 of all vulnerable species would be better off than they are today.

It is easy to believe that the world’s human population never will make the sacrifices needed to reduce global warming. Easy when after nine months and 1.47 million deaths we can’t accept and make the sacrifices required to stop the spread of the new coronavirus.

But there is hope. Back in the 1960s, one woman and her book led to the banning of DDT, the most powerful and most damaging pesticide ever produced. Rachel Carson was considered a radical and her book, Silent Spring, was called inflammatory but her meticulous research and powerful writing convinced people and governments that DDT was a danger that must be eliminated.

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Read From Shaman’s Rock: www.mindentimes.ca/columns