When he was still a young man, a friend of a friend had a job for a while as a movie stunt man. He learned how to fall off a cliff. How to survive an explosion. And how to roll a car, crash a car, flip a car, and still emerge alive.

            He learned how to work out all the calculations of speed and weight and lift so that he could safely launch a car off the end of a ramp and land without killing himself.

            And then one day he was asked to send a car crashing through a giant billboard.

            My young friend knew exactly how fast he had to be going, how steep the ramp must be, how far the car would fly, how it would land on the other side.

            But it felt different when he couldn’t see ahead through the giant billboard. Even if it was just made of paper.

Christmas will be different this year, for most of us. No travel, no family gatherings. I don’t expect to have anybody at all in my house over the holiday period. 

            But I’ve put up some Christmas decorations anyway. Then I got to the creche, the traditional manger scene. Ours is eclectic, to say the least.

            The core of the creche, of course, is the Holy Family – Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus. We bought those three figures long ago from the wood carvers in Oberammergau, the village in the Bavarian alps that puts on a world-famed Passion Play every ten years. 

            The three camels came from a shop in Jerusalem. We were assured they were carved of olive wood from the trees in the Garden of Gethsemane under which Jesus prayed the night of his arrest and trial. 

            But we didn’t have any Magi to ride in from the East on those camels. So I carved a set of three visitors myself. As a solid mass, blending into each other – as they do in the biblical text, too.

            There are some carved wooden sheep – they’re traditional. Also a donkey made by one of our grandchildren out of a toilet paper roll wrapped with string. 

            Plus a variety of less conventional animals. A hippo, from Africa. A cow, or maybe a water buffalo, from India. An elephant from Thailand. A giant tortoise from the Galapagos Islands. A ceramic penguin from Chile (I think). And an Irish Setter, in loving memory of our first dog.

Every year, as the Christmas season rolls around again, I feel impelled to dig into my archives, to see what might deserve saying a second time. 

            This column goes back to 2005. 

            I was driving from Kamloops back to Kelowna, normally less than a two-hour drive. A storm had coated the highway with ice. It took me over an hour just to get to the turnoff that led south towards Kelowna. 

            Just before the turnoff, the road tilted left. I could feel my car slipping sideways on the ice as I crept around yet another accident. Even the cop directing traffic couldn’t keep his feet under him. 

            Then, as I was about to accelerate gently ahead, I heard a tap at my passenger window. A pale, waiflike face peered in at me, bundled in a woolen scarf. 

            “Could you give me a ride?” she asked. “It’s real cold out here.”

            I don’t usually pick up hitchhikers, but these seemed to be exceptional circumstances. “Hop in,” I said. 

I changed the décor in our church the other day. I took down the Thanksgiving theme, and put up an Advent/Christmas theme. 

            It was a wasted effort, I suppose, because no one will see it. Provincial health officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry, has ruled that indoor in-person events such as worship services must be cancelled to control the spread of Covid-19. 

            I’m not sure on what basis she – and the government – determine that selling cosmetics and houseplants is an essential service, and worship is not. 

Here it is. The night before Christmas. 

            Technically, Christmas is a Christian celebration. About the birth of a baby in Bethlehem. Christian worship services – conducted mostly online this Christmas – will tell and re-tell, in story and song, of shepherds and angels and wise men from the east.

            But outside of church, those songs and stories blur into a kind of emotional fog, about good wishes and gifts, a fog that envelops Jews, Muslims, Baha’is, Hindus, everyone.

            It’s going to be a different Christmas this year. Thanks to the second wave of Covid-19 infections, multi-generations will not gather around a fireplace. Or a burdened table. 

            There will be few Norman Rockwell Christmases this year.