XXV XII MMXXI (Xmas)

The Christmas that almost wasn't - due to an ongoing global pandemic, a fourth surge powered by the relentless Omicron variant and constantly shifting restrictions for all travellers, even more for international ones. But we still managed to host a family gathering and have one of the best holidays ever.

My sister Tara and her husband Jerry had their flights from Houston cancelled or rescheduled more than 4 times, with the last one blessedly moving their departure from Christmas morning to Boxing Day. Parker and his wife Belinda managed to make it down despite her contracting Covid only two weeks prior.

We took the Churchillians to Candy Cane Lane their first evening in town, and all the ladies went to get a family tattoo the following day, an idea that had been brewing for quite some time. Some got it in colour, others in monochrome, some on their ankles, others on their arms, but I think the Celtic-inspired design they picked looks great in every iteration.

Tara and Jerry made it over midday on Christmas Eve, and we snacked and chatted through the afternoon, and Fenya's boyfriend Bobby arrived later in the afternoon. As is tradition in our household, had charcuterie for dinner. (We've done this ever since we were married, but called it "cold cuts" until recently.)

It just so happens that Belinda is a dab hand with a charcuterie board, so I was able to opt-out (based on the breakfasts and turkey I was responsible for). She took charge of delegating duties, slicing and arranging the frankly excessive amounts of meats and cheeses I had procured for the event, and by 6 pm, the table was filled with a grand variety of bite-sized treats, and a family eager to share them. 

And since we would have three fewer diners the next day, we decided to bust out the Christmas Crackers on Christmas Eve for the first time ever.

After dinner, we had a single-elimination crokinole tournament, complete with randomly assigned brackets. Glory and I played a qualifier for the 8th spot, and she ended up graciously officiating the event over the next few hours.

Those of us not playing or spectating chatted and drank, pulled up songs on the smart speaker and enjoyed the warmth of each other's company (as well as the fireplace we'd installed earlier this year). In the end I managed to nudge out Jerry for the victory, but a number of people hope this event will return for future gatherings. Has a new tradition been born? One can but hope...

It made for a late night, but Christmas morning saw us all reconvene far too early in order to open gifts together. There was much laughter and even more gratitude, and a gift of surprising sentimentality that left me uncharacteristically speechless (which I will probably blog about at a later date). 

All too soon, Jerry and Tara had to leave in order to get their pre-departure Covid test and for dinner with his family, and Fenya and Bobby left to have Christmas dinner with his family. Following a bit of much-needed downtime, we threw together a turkey dinner with stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet yams and Brussels sprouts, and Belinda made a delicious cranberry sauce with berries she had picked herself in Churchill. All five of us ate well, and of course, there were leftovers for days.

Boxing day saw the ladies head out to West Edmonton Mall so Belinda could experience an indoor amusement park, while Parker and I hit up some shops to find him a case for his snowmobile goggles and a replacement winter jacket (Columbia at Mark's, 55% off!). 

The ladies hadn't returned home before he and I left for the Canada-Czechia match of the World Juniors Hockey tournament. The tickets Parker had originally asked me to get had been cancelled due to a new 50% restriction cap applied only days before, but on a hunch I had checked online before turning in late on Christmas Eve. Miraculously, there were two open seats on an aisle in the corner, 11 rows from the ice!

It was a chilly walk to Rogers Place from our parkade four blocks away, and a strangely sterile environment inside, with no food or drink being served, but it was a great game that saw Canada pull back from a two-goal deficit to tie it up in the first period before going on to win 6-3.

We returned home to plates of cold cuts which we enjoyed with Imperial stouts while watching Slapshot, before joining the others downstairs and putting in yet another late night.

The day after Boxing Day saw the last of our guests leave us, as Parker and Belinda travelled to Winnipeg for Christmas observances with his mother and sisters (which sadly never happened due to a Covid outbreak in his sister's home). But before leaving, he insisted on addressing a fault in our home which has aggravated Audrey since we moved in a decade and a half ago: the basement light, which can only be turned on by a switch at the top of the stairs.

Parker, a retired hydro man and experienced wirer, determined very quickly that a three-way switch would take little effort to install (by him, anyways), so with three hours to go before leaving for his flight, we hit up first Home Depot and then Lowes for the requisite equipment.

It took him less time to get that wiring installed than it did for us to argue with the two staff at Home Depot about whether or not they sold 14/3 wire by the metre, and my sole contribution was unlimbering my jigsaw and cutting 10 feet of PVC conduit to house that same cabling. But there is a switch now where there once was none and it works!

Now the house is quiet and everyone has returned home. Audrey and Fenya are working at Education Station and Glory is helping her bestie get some groceries since the cold has perished her car. It is still bitterly cold outside (it took Glory and I 25 minutes to get into the house last night after returning from Leduc because the deadbolt had frozen solid), so Canéla and I are content to stay indoors after a busy week (and she misses Parker and Belinda worse than any of us, and ran downstairs this morning to greet them only to come back up looking a bit crestfallen.).

Looking back at our celebrations, I hope no one reading this thinks I am bragging, and I know this plague we are dealing with has scuttled many, many holiday plans. We were very lucky and blessed to have a Christmas for the books, aided in no small part by Audrey's efforts to make our humble abode look as Christmassy as possible.

The fact that we were able to get together at all this year feels miraculous to me, especially after having no one else around last year at this time. This recollection is only meant to reflect my deep and sincere gratitude for the family and friends I am fortunate to have in my life. 

And the fact that so many of our family are friends as well is the best Christmas gift of all.

(Updated Jan 5, 2021 to fix broken pic links.)

The Case for Books and The Man Built by Childcraft

The year I started school back in NewBrunswick, my father purchased a set of encyclopedias for my sister and I. It sat on the upper shelf of a custom book rack with the words "World Book" emblazoned on the side of each volume, and encompassing the entirety of the alphabet, as one might expect. Those reference works were a constant within my life, from before I could read until I left home for university.

But the second shelf is what brought me joy and taught me to love learning and knowledge: the Childcraft series, also known as the "How and Why Library."

15 volumes, each dedicated to a specific theme such as "How Things Work," "About Animals" or "World and Space." Truly, these were a timely blessing to a pre-internet childhood (and one with only three television channels).

Many were the Sunday afternoons or time between school and supper where I would pore over various volumes, some more so than others. About Animals was a favourite, as was World and Space - less so the Poems and Rhymes. But I remember reading most if not all the stories in the Children Everywhere volume, returning many times to read a short tale about a Swiss boy who rescues a marmot from a golden eagle, and a Lithuanian boy who climbs a tower to fly the old flag in the face of an occupying Soviet regime.

Some of the illustrations were remarkable, depicting an impossibly dense field of stars or an intimidating triggerfish. 

I am also confident that a straight line can be drawn from the lavish illustrations of Beowulf and my later readings of The Lord of the Rings and Conan.

Looking through the books recently, the things I hadn't remembered gave me pause for thought - had my love of mythology spawned from these stories and drawings?

Were they my first exposure to my favourite dinosaur*?

*Look, I know the dimetrodon is technically not a dinosaur and is instead merely a prehistoric lizard, but it still shows up in packs of dinosaur toys, so let it go, all right?

Was this where my appreciation/revulsion/horror regarding the komodo dragon, an enormous monitor lizard with powerful jaws and saliva that was not only venomous but also acidic, began?

But it was the 1975 Annual "The Magic of Words" that provided the most insight into my younger self.

Wherein I learned the provenance of names leading from ancestral occupations, and how "ghoti" could be pronounced "fish" if you put enough spin on it...

The first time I had ever come across Shakespeare was in this beautiful and whimsically illustrated scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream."

And learning that the Rosetta stone was cracked by a man who had seen the artifact as a boy and determined then that he would be the one to learn what the hieroglyphics within it were trying to convey to us, centuries later. Like a real-life Hardy Boy (my other familiar literary companions of childhood) he seemed to me.

My love of etymology and vocabulary, my appreciation for legend and history, and my enjoyment of trivia can probably all be traced to this one book within a remarkable set.

I loved reading these books, and I loved having a frame of reference for many of the things the teachers spoke of in elementary school. Constantly raising my hand, always happy to volunteer an answer or ask a question about something not covered yet, I quickly developed a reputation as a brainy kid. And I adored it and leaned into it, probably more than I should have, honestly. 

But despite the fact I bought a slide rule at a yard sale and a book on how to use it at the second-hand book shop on main street, it was never just an affectation - I honestly did love knowing things, and sharing the interesting things I found out about. I still do, obviously.

And I am still tremendously grateful for these books, a collection that answered hundreds of questions but galvanized a thousand other inquiries. I am a bit sad that the girls never found them as appealing as I did, but on the other hand, this spared me explaining why we weren't building a cardboard submarine, as I always pestered my father about...

And neither of them have asked to have potato chips crumbled on top of tunafish casserole, as I begged my mother for at least quarterly...

But the time has come at last to say goodbye. We have friends from church whose children and nieces and nephews are a bit bookwormy (bless them!) and who enjoy the retro charm of such things, so it is comforting to know that almost a half-century later, these Childcraft books may yet be appreciated.

But I can't believe they will appreciate them as much as I did. 

Thanks, Mum and Dad - I wish this revelation about how influential this one, doubtlessly significant purchase was on me had come earlier so I could have shared it with you.

But knowing you, you probably knew it more than I did.

You Played a Game About Birds? - Wingspan, Reviewed

I had an opportunity to teach the game Wingspan to 4 new people last night, and it was, as usual, a confusing delight.

It is a rare game that marries innovative mechanics with top-notch visuals and good production values, and you could be forgiven for thinking that the latter is so good that surely they must have scrimped on the former, but this is not so.

The cornerstone of the game is a beautifully illustrated deck of 170 cards, each depicting a different bird and containing a tremendous amount of information about them - where they live, the type of nest they have, and of course, their wingspan.

The cardboard dice tower included in the game is crafted to look like a wooden birdhouse or feeder, with wooden cubes depicting five different food types - this is the currency you will need to acquire in order to put the birds into play. 

Each player gets an equally exquisite board depicting a pastoral scene raging from trees at the top through grasslands in the middle and then wetlands at the bottom. This is the sanctuary each player is attracting an assortment of birds to, with room for five different avians in each habitat. Each row is associated with a different aspect of play, either gathering food, laying eggs or drawing more cards so you have an assortment to choose from. 

Most of the birds played have some sort of additional rule so that after a few turns, nearly every action you take will have other effects cascading off of it, which a cunning player can turn to their advantage. 

In addition to the points you get for adding birds to your sanctuary, you are also rewarded for having those birds lay eggs, and other birds may have special rules that let them cache food, take food from the feeder when it is not their turn. There are even predators who can feed upon random birds drawn from the deck, eating them if their intended victim's wingspan is below a certain threshold. (And then there are scavengers who are rewarded whenever this happens.)

And lastly, there is a bonus objective in each of the 4 rounds of play, rewarding players who perhaps have the most eggs in a certain type of nest, or birds in a certain habitat.

It is not a difficult game to play - there are only four actions to choose from on your turn - but it can be a tricky game to understand, and even the smartest of folks can take a while to come around to truly grokking it in a Heinleinian sense. Strange then, that the last two times I have taught the game, the players who lamented their lack of understanding the most went on to win it on both occasions...

There is not a lot of direct competition in the game, although there can be a certain amount of  'poaching' from the face-up birds that are up for grabs. Each player though is largely responsible for their own fate, and sometimes the order in which they choose to do things can be as critical as the actions themselves. There are even "Automa" rules included to enable solitaire play.

Looking at the birds and their powers and the goals for this and upcoming rounds, you plan and scheme and concoct, aligning your birds with the best possible combinations, like a sort of puzzle or Rube Goldberg machine. Wingspan is sometimes called an 'engine building' game, as each player seeks to combine actions in an efficient way. It sounds more like work than a game when I say it that way, but thankfully it is entertaining too.

Considering that even abstracted, non-violent games are often structured around direct competition or player elimination (I'm looking at you, Monopoly), and how much of my personal game collection is battle-oriented, I can't say enough about how refreshing it was to sit down with friends and take turns perusing and collecting bird cards for - good grief, almost three hours?!

Well, if that isn't an endorsement, what is? I can heartily recommend Wingspan for both lovers of birds and those who appreciate unique game mechanics, and evenings of gentle gaming.