Photostory #380: Twinkling Lights, Soft Snors, AddTouch of Magic: Canada Lights Up For Christmas In White

Photographers
Pierre Gaudard , Chris Lund , W. [Bill] Lingard , unattributed
Maker
National Film Board of Canada
Release Date
December 18, 1964
Collection
CMCP fonds
Credit Line
Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography fonds, National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives
Main Text
When the whispering winds of winter deep-drift the first gentle snows across the vastness of the land, then is time for a myriad twinkling, colored lights to sparkle frostily over another Christmas scene. For Canadians in general, Christmases are always white. The fresh falls of winter's magic mantle have already muted big-city traffic, gilded brightly-lit shopping centres, hushed silent the open countryside with a soft, firm embrace. Suburban residential districts, transformed into white, translucent wonderlands of sugar-candy houses, come aglow each early evening with milky-ways of shimmering, multi-colored, artificial stars, and illuminated messages from folks within bid good cheer to passers-by without. Far from the winking reflections of Christmas lights strung through ornamental garden trees and under roof-top eaves, the snows are deeper yet. Where the lone wolf treads with careful delicacy the thin supporting crust atop the powder snow, where the big pine trees and firs loom dark against a moonlit sky, where undulating barrens roll endlessly towards the polar star, where high mountain peaks sit in timeless solitude - there too, the Christmas snows of Canada command the silence. For, here and there among the majestic expanses of wild land, small groups of Canadians link thoughts of goodwill across the sparkling snows, to join with a nation once more aglow with a Christmas in white.
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