Publisher Pamela McColl is certainly not shy about altering a Christmas classic.
Nor is she inhibited from championing her cause against smoking.
And it's those two worlds which combine in a gently re-worked version of Clement C. Moore's beloved holiday tale Twas the Night Before Christmas.
McColl has already published a version where the jolly old elf 's predilection for taking a puff or two from his pipe was edited out. Now, she is back with the slightly altered chain of events about the arrival of Santa Claus on Dec. 24 with his reindeer and a sleigh full of presents, this time in Chinese.
And next Wednesday (Dec. 4) the Vancouverite is slated to attend the Richmond Chamber of Commerce Breakfast Event to talk about her latest take on Moore's work that was first published way back in 1823.
The new publication is available in e-books and was printed in softcover edition by local Richmond printing company West Coast Reproduction Centres Ltd.
Having the story reprinted in Chinese is especially poignant for McColl, who pointed to statistics in that country where smoking is still enjoyed by a sizeable segment of the population.
According to McColl, China has the largest number of smoking-related deaths worldwide. Two thirds of Chinese people think smoking does no harm, 60 per cent think it is not linked to lung cancer, and 96 per cent do not think it is a cause of heart disease.
In comparison, about 17 per cent of Canadians, or about 4.8 million people, are smokers, according to the 2010 Canadian Tobacco Use Monitoring Survey, down from 18 per cent a year before.
