We bought our kids one of the popular new tech items for Christmas this year. The item in question was much in demand and hard to find here in Toronto, so a couple of weeks before Christmas I ordered them online from the manufacturer.
The manufacturer provided a shipment-tracking website, and I began watching in growing amazement. On the Monday before Christmas, my kids' Christmas presents were in Shenzhen, China, a place I admit never having heard of before (it's a booming city of some ten million people adjacent to Hong Kong in what China calls a Special Economic Zone). On Tuesday they passed through Anchorage, Alaska. On Wednesday they reached Memphis, Tennessee, and later that morning they were in Mississauga. Friday morning they were at the door, and though I was out, I knew they had arrived because I checked the web-tracker and it said "delivered." Sunday morning my kids unwrapped them with delight.
The idea that we are living through a time of historic change passed through my mind. But I think we are finding ways to deal with our new global existence.
A few days before those packages started their orbit, we attended the Christmas concert of the High Park Children's Choir in a church a few blocks from our home. My elder daughter sang with that choir six years ago, and the repertoire was mostly classical. "Stille Nacht" and "Il est ne, le divin enfant" pretty much marked the boundaries of its outreach to the music of the world.
This year the repertoire being sung by these blond, pale daughters of the Toronto middle classes included rhythms from South Asia, Africa, and aboriginal Canada, quite extraordinarily beautiful even to my (mostly tin) ear. The conductor's previous employment was at a choir school in Kazakhstan.
Part way though the concert, I was feeling just a touch of disorientation. It was magnificent, but weren't there to be any Christmas songs I knew? But they ended with the audience participating on Good King Wenceslas and Little Town of Bethlehem, and I was wholly reconciled.
The world is changing. Christmas is changing. We are learning to live with it. And benefit from it.
All the best for the season and the New Year. There will be lots of history happening.
