A Heart-Warming Christmas Story
The Saturday Huddle is a weekly column that features opinion, analysis, and reflections on Huddle stories, podcasts, and business news in the region. Mark Leger is the Director of News Content for Acadia Broadcasting and Huddle.
At a stoplight in Saint John a couple of weeks ago, a man looking for change approached my car. I rolled down the window, smiled, and gave him a few dollars.
“How are you today?” I asked. “Good,” he said, “but it’s cold.” He rubbed his hands together as he stepped away and approached the next car. It was very windy and cold, with a mix of falling rain and snow. The light was still red, I pulled off my gloves and called him back over. “Want these gloves?” He took them and thanked me, the light turned green, and we went on our way.
I’ve been reading Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol and the pressing issues and debates about community, responsibility, and charity in 19th-century England resonate in the Maritimes of today. This is especially true around Christmastime when many people are feeling more charitable and the cold weather is settling in, making the challenges of being low-income or homeless more serious, and more obvious, to people around them.
The Scrooge we meet early in A Christmas Carol is disdainful and dismissive. He doesn’t see himself as part of a community where people get to know and take care of each other; he doesn’t see it as a source of meaning and happiness.
Marley’s ghost tries to make him see he will pay a price for being so self-absorbed.
“It is required of every man,” the Ghost [said], “that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow men, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death. It is doomed to wander through the world – oh, woe is me! – and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness!”
Marley, of course, paid this price, advising Scrooge to “be nice or else.” Scrooge’s nephew Fred also tries to convince him to be a more charitable, community-minded person. But Fred’s that kind of person himself, and not like the tortured soul Marley who now knows he should have been a better person when he was alive.
“I have always thought of Christmas time…as a good time,” said Fred, “a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”
In my experience, the world has many more people like Fred, who aren’t perfect but try to connect and be helpful in their own way, than Marley or Scrooge, caricatures of cruel, greedy, rich people that don’t care about their communities and the vulnerable people who need their help.
I’m at that stage of life with a busy family and job where I feel a little disengaged from my community; my contributions are limited to the occasional outreach and connection with someone on the street. But I used to be heavily involved as the coordinator of the Saint John steering committee on homelessness.
I got to see and experience how complex the issues were. Many vulnerable people faced a variety of challenges: among them housing and food insecurity; inadequate financial support; lack of proper education and job training; mental and physical health issues; and addictions. As much as we’d like this to be an easily solved problem, it isn’t, I learned.
But I also got to work with well-meaning, hard-working, and intelligent people trying to address the root causes of poverty and homelessness, making gains where they could. And they came from all walks of life – community activists and support workers; government bureaucrats and politicians; faith leaders; and people from low-income communities and wealthy business owners.
I most remember moments when I made true connections with people. One winter, we opened a temporary shelter in a city-centre church because the Salvation Army shelter was at capacity. I used to do overnight shifts and one night the volunteers and the men staying there were up late chatting. Singer-songwriter Stompin’ Tom Connors was born in Saint John and lived in poverty himself. A few of the older men shared stories of seeing him around town when he was a kid. Area restaurants also volunteered to cook food for the shelter, and we often shared meals together (a perk of volunteering was sharing the food if there was enough to go around!).
People are engaged in a variety of ways. They work in emergency shelters or food banks. They do mental health counselling. They connect people in need with financial support and education and employment opportunities. They work on housing initiatives.
Ultimately, though, they’re all people engaged in making their communities better places for everyone. They make connections with each other; they support each other. That includes the people helping and the people being helped. I was enriched by my connection to the men in that shelter, and I’m sure other people doing that kind of work have similar experiences.
They do things big or small, whether it’s giving someone a meal, pressing the government for policy changes, or using resources and know-how to build a community with a transformative impact on people’s lives.
This is what tech executive and social entrepreneur Marcel LeBrun and a team of volunteers did when they created the 12 Neighbours Community, a neighbourhood of tiny homes for homeless people in Fredericton.
Former Huddle intern Jessica Saulnier recently produced a documentary on the community for a class at St. Thomas University. In “From Feeling Invisible to Community Mayor: Meet Al”, she profiled Al Smith, who speaks about his sense of security, community, and empowerment since he moved into one of the homes.
“I’m the happiest I’ve ever been,” he says. “I’ve never been this happy…I love it here and I’ll be here forever.”
We don’t hear Marcel speak in Jessica’s piece, but Al talks fondly of him and his influence.
“Marcel and I met right away – I think it was the day after I first moved here. He knows a lot. He’s a very smart man. I take a lot from him, and I keep it, some of it I don’t. Sorry Marcel, [but] I do keep the good stuff,” says Al with a laugh.
“There’s things that get to my heart. Anything that he gives me that my heart feels, it’s really good.”
Al’s not just talking about the roof over his head here. He’s talking about that connection he feels that touches his heart, much like how Fred talks about how Christmas is a time when people “open their shut-up hearts freely,” a message that ultimately resonates with Scrooge.
I feel it when I hand a man a pair of gloves on a cold day or share a bowl of stew in a shelter on a winter night.
It doesn’t solve the problems of poverty and homeless, but following our hearts is a good place a start.