A Christmas card just for you and everyone else.
Merry Christmas, Richmond News readers!
I’ve enjoyed serving you this year as a columnist and carrier. The carrier part was such an experience that I’ll write about it in a later column.
Right now, it’s great to be sharing my family Christmas card with you. As a printed and folded card, it has the “REJOICE!” art on the front. Think of this message, as written, and look at the art. What do you see?
A bright light breaking through dark clouds to bathe the scene in a cone of light? Ecstatic dancers celebrating an evergreen bough tip or sapling or small tree? Giant lady ferns, kelp and scattered seeds? Good!
For the artist, my youngest child Suzanna, it’s the essence of the season. The little dancers are simply people, with no gender or race or prestige, let alone lording over nature.
Whether the time of the scene is today or millennia past or future, they’re just happy to be alive, accepted and accepting, responsible to nature, which makes it all possible.
Among many images, what came most to Suzanna’s creative mind was Burn in the Fraser, last summer’s four-day arts festival at Cheam Fishing Village, a First Nation site in Agassiz.
One thousand participants formed and enjoyed a temporary town and left the site without a trace or a little better.
That reflects the caring ethos and respect for those who steward the land year-round.
The first Christmas story is like that, with Joseph and Mary and the shepherds. As I see it, they came with good intents, and the family fitted in at the stable and left joyous memories. Also, in the gospel, Jesus is “the light of humanity,” and one can choose to see that in the art.
In the same vein, one can choose to see the central evergreen as a Christmas tree or a symbol of ongoing life in even the darkest times or a sapling with immense potential as life gets spurred anew after the winter solstice.
For Suzanna, the “Rejoice!” on the front means “be joyous again,” from its French origins. The one printed phrase inside, “Rejoice and be glad,” adds a note of gratefulness.
Suzanna designed our first homemade Christmas card in Grade 1. Each year I suggest doing a card. Twenty cards later, the response is still “Sure, Dad.” Her focus group for it is the whole family.
Suzanna now has a master’s in arts education. She loves teaching art and a developmental disability program in the Surrey School District. Always, it seems to me, it’s in the spirit of Christmas.
Jim Wright is president of the Garden City Conservation Society.
