When I say I had never spent Christmas in a small town before, that’s not exactly true — not at all, in fact. When I was a child, I had a grandgfather in the community of Creston in southwestern British Columbia, not far from the U.S. border and — a fact I did not know at the time — a short drive away from the polygamous community of Bountiful, which you may have heard of in the news. And we would drive there, most summers and every couple of years at Christmas, through the Crowsnest Pass on winding mountain roads. You also may have seen Creston on those old television ads for Kokanee beer, the guy with the blue house next to the brew house, the rhyming and always someone in the commercial who didn’t quite get the back-and-forth, and it was true, there was that house, and it was blue, sitting inside the brewery’s fence. We went and checked one day.

But since entering my adult years, Christmas has for the most part been in Calgary,
except for two years in a row working through the holidays in Halifax, which is small enough but it’s no Creston (pop. 5,000), where there was a bird sanctuary but no MacDonald’s, and a bakery with the best butterhorns you’ve ever tasted.

This year, after a few days in Calgary at home with family and friends and beers and snow, Christa, her brother and I drove up on HIghway 22 more than five hours on mostly straight roads, our route taking us west enough from Edmonton that the provincial capital might not have existed at all, through Mayerthorpe, which you also might have heard about on the news, and we arrived in Whitecourt sometime in the late afternoon on Christmas Eve.

Whitecourt has a population of 10,000 people but driving through the downtown it somehow feels like less. The Wal-Mart and Canadian Tire near the row of gas stations and hotels along the main highway might have stolen some of the life out of the town centre, black holes sucking the community away from itself, which is what happens when they talk about progress. Or perhaps I’m reading into things. It’s a mill town, and there is steam rising above factory-sized buildings sprinkled through town, and like any mill town, there have been layoffs, even a few in the past year, but these are the times we’re in.

And it’s in Whitecourt that I found myself holding a long piece of black piping with a potato stuffed in one end, and at the other, where the pipe widens out to form a chamber of sorts, the fumes of fragarent hairspray curling around themselves in the cold darkness.

It was cold, but not cold enough that you couldn’t take your mits off for a second to put your thumb and middle finger on either side of a small metal switch, and then you snap like you would to music, which rubs a flint inside the chamber. The flint lights a spark and the spark ignites the hairspray, and if only to prove true all of those urban legends about hairspray lighting people’s hair on fire (Michael Jackson notwithstanding), a deafening crack sends the potato flying into the distance.

That was after the ATVs and the tobogganing and before the buffet-style dinner on the side of a hill on the outskirts of town, parents of in-laws of in-laws, and it was a few days after the turkey and the presents and the gingerbread cookies, and another day still after the swiss cheese fondu, and it was Whitecourt, Christmas in a small town, and it was good.