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Santa Claus has gone through many permutations over the last few centuries. He started off as Sinterklaas, the Dutch name for Saint Nicholas, and then ended up as the older gentleman in the red suit snapping pictures with tots in just about every mall in North America. However, our heart belongs to Whitehorse’s Garbage Truck Santa. Eva Holland explained how he came to be in “Santa, Take the Wheel”:
It started out simply enough, he tells me after we’ve settled in at his kitchen table, with his husky, Sasha, curled up nearby. [Wayne] Henderson was a casual employee with the City of Whitehorse in the early 1990s, on municipal garbage pick-up duty, when he would notice kids spilling out of their houses to watch his big truck go by. Around Christmastime one year he asked his boss, “What would you think if I put a Santa suit on? ” He got the okay so long as he promised not to get his false white beard caught in the truck’s trash compactor. [Read more]
The CBC just published a feature on halal investments—financial products in keeping with Islamic beliefs. What’s sexier than money? Well, sex, probably. Here’s an excerpt from Sheima Benembarek’s book, Halal Sex:
Azar is familiar with traditional Islamic views on queerness, though they’ve never received any negative messaging from the Sufi faith itself. They’re strongly against the idea that the God they’ve been raised with could be so basic. “I don’t feel like somewhere there is a god sitting around judging me for being queer. I just don’t believe in a god that would sit around thinking about that kind of stuff.” They chuckle. But they’re also aware that this type of ideology has contributed to the lack of discussion about sexuality in their family. And that this, in turn, has indirectly informed some of Azar’s opinions and decisions. [Read more]
A new poll shows a lot of wide-ranging opinions of what it means to be middle class in Canada, with respondents suggesting that incomes anywhere from $20,000 to $150,000 can earn you the label. In 2021, Max Fawcett probed what it all means in “How to Save the Middle Class”:
In our ever more polarized society, it remains a shared identity both aspirational and uncontroversial. Members of the middle class are celebrated as hard-working citizens who want what’s best for kin and community and are therefore engines of both progress and stability. “Societies with a strong middle class,” writes OECD chief of staff Gabriela Ramos in her foreword to the report, “have lower crime rates, they enjoy higher levels of trust and life satisfaction.” The middle class, in a sense, is the immune system of modern democratic societies: weakening it weakens us all. [Read more]
If you’ve had one slice of panettone too many over the holidays and are vowing to stick to healthier habits in 2024, Carine Abouseif’s “Feeling the Burn: The Workout Video from Jane Fonda to Peloton” will give you plenty of food for thought:
In early episodes [of The Jack LaLanne Show], LaLanne, clad in a tightly belted exercise boiler suit complete with shoulder pads and a plunging neckline, became a trainer, cheerleader, and therapist, thanking participants for allowing him into their homes. But the five-day schedule women were encouraged to keep made exercise a sort of labour as well as leisure. The crunches, calf raises, and jumping jacks could easily be perceived as an unavoidable wifely duty, writes Shelly McKenzie, the author of Getting Physical, a 2013 book on the rise of fitness culture in America. In a way, the schedule also advocated a form of self-surveillance, with participants watching for “unwanted” changes in their bodies and chastising themselves for missing workout appointments. [Read more]
Our Substack will be on hiatus until the new year. See you in January!