I froze my toes waiting for Santa Claus ...

Now doesn’t that sound like a song? This was on the occasion of Toronto’s annual Santa Claus Parade, held this year on 21st November, which, being a week before Advent, felt a little early to me. I took up a vantage point outside the Royal Ontario Museum, though after a while I moved about a bit to keep warm. It takes stamina to stick it out for the whole thing, I suspect especially if needing to keep children entertained until the appearance of a red suited man with an amplified voice being pulled by a lorry. The official website responds to the question “Is he here yet?” with “Santa works on North Pole time. Waiting for the parade to start can be tough on little ones. Come prepared with colouring books and toys. Try out the Santa Parade iPhone App - kids love it.” However, there are regular patrols of clowns who throw out candy/sweets to pacify the waiting crowd. (I’m not sure whether to use Canadian/American words or British ones here – especially as Canadian English is a mixture of British and American English so I’m not always sure which is Canadian usage.)

This was an interesting cultural experience, with schools and community groups (e.g. the Ukrainian Canadian association) being joined by various governmental and corporate entities including the police, Air Canada, and McDonalds, all making themselves cuddly and friendly with the aid of aeroplanes with smiley faces, magical creatures and plenty of marching bands. Discussing this afterwards, I wasn’t quite sure if ‘parading’ is something we do in the UK. I think there are festive processions from time to time, but it isn’t so much a part of the culture and perhaps these go by names other than ‘parade’. We certainly don’t have as much of a marching band tradition – I think a lot of high schools over here have marching bands. The University of Toronto engineering department had a band who played saucepans as percussion alongside more conventional brass instruments and were accompanied by energetic cheerleaders chanting “U of T” whilst forming themselves into the appropriate letter shapes.

The various marching bands seemed often to be offering variations on a set repertoire. In particular, I noted multiple versions of Santa Claus is Coming to Town and Joy to the World. I am open to correction, but my impression is that whilst Joy to the World is known and sung in the UK, at least by many churchgoers, it’s not quite in the premier league of carols that everybody knows (O Come All Ye Faithful, O Little Town of Bethlehem, Away in a Manger etc), whereas it seems that it is a premier league carol in Canada and the USA.



Speaking of Christmas carols, I was recently part of an ad hoc choir singing Silent Night in twelve languages. This group was made up of attendees of Knox Presbyterian Church from different countries and we sang it as part of the church Christmas party. We sang each line in a different language.



After a Christmas dinner for all ages in the church’s packed gym, the 20s-30sish crowd danced the night away at a college down the street. One of the more impressive features of this celebration was a homemade gingerbread house version of Knox Church, complete with roof tiles and stained glass windows made of different kinds of confectionery. It seemed a little sacrilegious to break it up and eat it at the end of the night, though I guess you could read this as the community of the faithful partaking of the life of the church. Or something like that.





I froze my hair recently too. Long term readers might remember that I did this a year ago in Cambridge, though on that occasion it took quite a while fighting through a blizzard to attain frozen hair, and on this occasion it happened in about a minute without the aid of snow. On Monday, 13th December, I left my house in a hurry, having just had a shower. I hadn’t counted on Toronto having a “flash freeze” that day after a weekend of fairly mild (above freezing) temperatures. I catch the streetcar/tram at the end of the road, about two minutes walk away. Halfway down the road, I realised that my hair was frozen. Apparently it was -13°C that day, with wind chill making it feel like -23°C.

Since arriving in Canada, I’ve been telling people that it doesn’t get as cold in the UK and that it doesn’t get much snow compared to Canada. That was before the past few weeks when there’s been crazy amounts of snow in the UK, which got members of my family stranded in Berwick on Tweed overnight en route to a wedding in Edinburgh. There has been snow on the ground for the last couple of weeks in Toronto, but it isn’t especially deep. For Canada, Toronto tends not to get that much snow – it’s by Lake Ontario, which helps to create a micro-climate. Apparently only about half an hour north of the city it gets much snowier. A few years ago when there was an unusual amount of snow, the mayor of Toronto called out the army to clear it, an incident which has elicited mockery from the rest of Canada ever since, though Torontonians can explain why it was a sensible move given the much higher population density of Toronto and other factors (there are over 5 million people in the Greater Toronto Area, out of a total Canadian population of about 35 million).


(UK covered in snow, courtesy of Dundee University via the BBC)

I was supposed to be returning to the UK over the Christmas holiday period, not only to see family and friends, but also for my viva, where I was due to defend my PhD on December 20th. I didn’t make it back, and though it would be convenient to blame the snow, I can’t truthfully put the whole blame there. Rather, due to multiple sillinesses on my part, I managed to miss my flight and also, in the aftermath of this, to lose my passport, which was the more serious problem. Whilst it would in principle be possible to obtain an emergency travel document through the British consulate in Toronto, I didn’t manage to get the right paperwork together before they closed for the weekend, and so there was no way I could get to Cambridge before the scheduled time for my viva.

It might just about have been possible to get back before Christmas day. However, Heathrow was then closed for a few days due to the weather, presumably creating a backlog of people who would be shifted onto later flights in the last few days before Christmas, and I would still need to obtain an emergency travel document. Consequently I concluded, on advice from my family, that it would be less stressful to stay in Toronto over Christmas. Whilst of course it was sad to be away from family at Christmastime, I know that I will be returning to the UK at some point in the relatively near future once my viva/defence is rescheduled.


(My house is the middle one)

Also, I’m not lonely in Toronto, since I’m connected to enough networks that I’m getting fairly regular invitations to meals and social gatherings of one kind or another. Through a church hospitality programme for internationals away from home, I was invited to a dinner with a couple, the husband descended from English settlers in Connecticut in 1640, and the wife born in Japan before moving to Canada with her family as a child.

On Christmas Eve I went with some church friends to a Christmas pageant (which I think translates as nativity play) which had live animals, including a camel. Afterwards we went back to someone’s mum’s house where we ate beef stew and played a board game which involved moving "robots" around the board by "programming" them with cards.



On Christmas Day my landlord took pity on me and got me invited to Christmas dinner at his sister’s house. There were 17 people there, most of them somehow related to each other plus one or two assorted boyfriends. I lost track a bit of who was connected to whom and how, but there were Italian and Portuguese roots represented, and so the food was good. We had appetisers including baked brie with cranberry and herbs (I think), spicy olives, and shrimp with spicy sauce (though I think “shrimp” in North American usage actually means what Brits call prawns rather than shrimp), followed by a turkey Christmas dinner which also included a risotto dish, and a choice of about five desserts including Christmas cake, tiramisu and something with walnuts.



On Christmas Eve, my landlord made me a breakfast of bagels with scrambled egg and jam (not both on the same bagel) and German sausages. On Boxing Day he made me a breakfast of waffles with bacon and maple syrup. When I arrived in late September, he picked me up from the airport and didn’t charge me rent until the beginning of October to simplify matters. A friend commented to me, “You have the nicest landlord ever”.

As anyone reading this who didn’t already know may have guessed, I am currently living in Toronto in Canada. I moved here at the end of September to take up a postdoctoral research fellowship for a year at the University of Toronto. I had been intending to blog my impressions of my new country of residence, but though I have plenty of observations to blog about, over the past term I failed to find a regular time slot in the week for doing so Though I don’t promise, as there are other things which will take a higher priority in my scheduling, I hope to be able to resume posting here regularly enough to warrant checking back. Retroblogging some of my observations of the past few months will give me enough to post for a while.