Most Saturday mornings, when we rise and shine around our house, I head outside for one of my weekly rituals. I trek down the driveway and retrieve the weekend newspaper. It’s usually not hard to find – even in the snow – because it’s such a huge package inside a plastic bag. It’s got about eight or 10 regular sections in it, from world news to the insight section to the latest in condos (which frankly, I can take or leave). But there’s so much paper in that edition of the Star, that I often joke to my wife:

“Here it is, my dear,” I say, “your tree.” (more…)

I simply went to exchange a Christmas gift. By 11 a.m. on Dec. 30, I reached the electronics store in south Whitby, Ont. But because of holiday demand, the store didn’t have much selection left. So, they gave me a credit and asked me to come back in the new year. I headed home – northbound on Thickson Road. It was just after noon. On the radio they were about to announce the roster for Team Canada, the men’s Olympic hockey team.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the announcer said, “Steve Yzerman.”

That’s the last sound that came from my car radio. At that moment, I entered the intersection of Thickson and Rossland, east of downtown Whitby. As I did, a one-ton pickup truck suddenly came at me from the right. Before I could react, we collided and my car was spinning clockwise. I thought, “There’s going to be a second impact … a pole … another vehicle … or a least the curb.” But it never came.

Fortunately, my little old Corolla just stopped spinning on its own. And – seconds later – when I focused, I was facing the opposite direction. The truck that had hit me sat crosswise in front of me. I was covered in glass and debris from the truck’s front-end and what was left of the passenger’s side of my car. Then I consciously looked to my hands and feet. Thankfully, I could move them. A woman approached and told me my head was bleeding. And I suddenly felt pain there. A moment or two later a man with a cell phone to his ear approached from the driver’s side, opened the door and spoke with a bit of an accent.

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The sounds of Christmas are everywhere in song, whether Silent Night or Little Town of Bethlehem or even the Chipmunks’ Christmas Song and Deck the Halls with Boston Charlie. But I’ve got a story of a Christmas song you’ve never heard of. In fact, it’s not even about Christmas; it’s about the day before. It began one day back in 2001 when my father – Alex Barris – called me with a problem.

“I’ve written a song,” he said. “It’s called ‘It’s Christmas Eve.’”

“So what’s the problem?” I asked.

Dad said it was a piece he’d composed some years before. Not only had he written up the musical score sheets and the lyrics, but he had also published it and even recorded a rough soundtrack of his own voice singing it. His dilemma, he told me, was that he now wanted to have the song professionally recorded in a studio, with piano accompaniment and a female vocalist. Therein lay the dilemma, he said. He wanted one of our daughters to record it. But which one?

“Why not have them do it together,” I suggested, “in harmony.”

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Monday night was bittersweet. Through the evening, a lot of friends and neighbours shared food and drink in anticipation of holiday festivities, just days away. But in the middle of a special wine and food tasting at the Tin Mill, a local eatery in Uxbridge, Ont., I listened to a friend of mine grieve. He couldn’t fathom that just eight weeks ago, his son Christopher was as alive as ever.

“I wake up each day thinking he’ll be there,” Warren Skinner told me. “It’s absolutely surreal.”

Christopher, Warren and Ellen Skinner’s 27-year-old son, died on Adelaide Street in Toronto on Oct. 18. He’d been celebrating his sister Taryn’s birthday in the city’s entertainment district. He’d begun to walk home about 3 a.m. As best authorities could determine, it appeared that Christopher and occupants of a dark-coloured SUV had a confrontation. The police said his attackers beat Chris to the ground, then drove over him and sped away. That cowardly act snuffed out an extraordinary young man’s life and devastated his family.

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There’s a standard post-game joke that circulates in most recreational hockey or oldtimers’ dressing rooms. Especially if the butt of the joke has made a ridiculously bad pass, missed an obvious goal or (in the case of a goalie) blown an easy save during the game. It doesn’t take long – within minutes of the end of the scrimmage – and it usually follows a short period of silence as players catch their breaths on the dressing room benches. Then, it comes with the predictability of a sunrise.

“So what happened?” the jokester begins. “Did you trip on your toe picks?”

In case you didn’t get the reference, toe picks are the jagged edges common to the leading edge of most figure skaters’ skates. The point is that the hockey player involved in the gaffe, looked so hopelessly inept during the play, that the worst comparison the jokester could imagine would be the hockey player being only good enough to try figure skating or ice dancing.

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Recently, I spoke to a midday session of the International Writers’ Festival in Ottawa. I projected images of veterans I have known onto a movie screen. Then, I told stories about the men’s and women’s nearly total reluctance to speak about their wartime experiences. It’s the subject of my latest book, “Breaking the Silence.” And I finished my talk this way:

“I’ve spent many of the past 30 years writing the stories of battle,” I said. “In this latest work, I’ve attempted to write about the battle to get the stories.”

In my talk, I offered several key illustrations of the way Canadian veterans have almost universally refused to share with their families and civilian friends the extraordinary moments of their war. Among the examples of this unwritten code of silence, I cited the story of my closest air force friend Charley Fox. Though he had completed 234 successful sorties in air force Spitfires and won two Distinguished Flying Crosses, he rarely spoke about his successful airborne attack on the highest ranking and most important German general in occupied France, Erwin Rommel.

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The world ended that night. A high school girl in a major eastern city was hysterical; she claimed she and her girlfriends cried and held each other preparing to die. Rural residents on mid-western farms prayed harder than they ever had before. And thousands more rushed headlong into the streets of New York City that night. They hallucinated that aliens from outer space were invading their city, their country, their planet. They’d heard a radio broadcast – 71 years ago tomorrow night – and thought it was really the end of life on Earth.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” they heard the announcer say, “this is the most terrifying thing I have ever witnessed! … Wait a minute! Someone’s crawling out of the hollow top … Someone or something. I can see peering out of that black hole two luminous discs … are they eyes? It might be a face…”

Fright, real fright was born Oct. 30, 1938.

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