Diversity, Inclusion, and Triumph!

             Every year, about this time, we get bombarded with commercials and ads promising that our friends and family will only truly love us or have a really Merry Christmas if we stuff their stockings with the latest computer devices, extravagant toys and piles of expensive diamonds.            But you know what? It just isn’t true. My grandmother told me so. * * * *            The early 1940s were a tough time for a lot of people as the Great Depression had not completely petered out and a terrible war was roaring overseas. In the winter of 1941, my grandparents were living in a small woodstove-heated cabin with their four little children deep in the Alberta countryside. And they were penniless. With the farm laying buried under impenetrable snowdrifts, Grandpa tried to make his winter living by sawing firewood for the neighbors with a rig he made out of his tractor. But work was sc...

              When I say the word “Christmas”, what are the first five things that come to mind? Trees? Wreaths? Bells? Candy canes? Dear old Santa Clause? Any of those answers would be perfectly correct and nearly everyone would probably come up with at least a few of them.                Or would they?                Did you know there are people in this world for whom Christmas conjures up a whole different image? People who would see your Christmas as very strange and unusual? I had the opportunity to find that out first-hand, one amazing evening.                We had a guest speaker in our children’s church group the year I was about 11 years old. She had come to give us a presentation about her work in Sweden. Sweden! I had heard of that place. Daddy told me we had ancestors from there and that’s where our name, Magnusson, came...

                   Can the spirit of Christmas survive even the worst of circumstances?               As you recall from your school days studies, a terrible war split the world in two in the summer of 1914. Then called “The Great War” or “The War to End All Wars”, we now recall it as World War I.               As December of that year rolled around, the Christmas sprit really didn’t stand a chance in the dark and filthy trenches of the battlefield. There were no sparkling decorations, no colourful lights or ringing bells, no heartwarming scents of pine needles and gingerbread. There were only crowds of filthy, exhausted men a world away from those they loved trying to survive in the unimaginably cold and muddy conditions of war.            ...