Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Pique n' your interest

Getting into the Christmas spirit

It’s easy to forget there are people cold and hungry in the world when you live in Disneyland north.

In Whistler people don’t live on the streets. They don’t sleep in doorways or over subway grates and they don’t ask for money on Main Street. This isn’t the big city with the big city problems.

In Toronto, where it was -27C with the wind chill factor on Tuesday, the first cold weather warning of the season was issued.

Extra street patrols were on hand to bring anyone they could indoors and to check throughout the night on those who insisted on staying in the bitter cold.

Since the winter of 1995-1996, the city has been more diligent in its efforts to help the homeless after three men died that winter as a result of sleeping outside. But it never seems to be enough.

I remember a debate around the dinner table one Christmas. We were talking about the horrors of the homeless situation in Toronto, which seems to be getting worse every year, and one family member brought up a series of articles about homeless people that ran in a national newspaper.

In this series a reporter went undercover, posing as a homeless person for one week.

This reporter was making hundreds of dollars, panhandling.

Of course, this reporter also had the luxury of his full mental health, not to mention the indescribable luxury of being able to go home in seven days and escape the homelessness plight forever.

The controversial series of articles sparked debate, not just at our Christmas dinner table, but I’m sure at dinner tables around the country.

Some at out dinner table thought that the people standing in the subway in the weeks leading up to Christmas had hit upon the scam of the century. Hitting up sensitive souls for a Loonie here and a Twoonie there.

If I recall, I think somebody at the table actually said that if he was going to give his change away then a person should be doing something for him, like playing a tune, doing a little jig, shining his shoes.

Bah-Humbug I thought – am I actually related to these people?

Others argued that very few people would choose to make their living literally begging for money. That sometimes there simply is no other course of action when all the doors have been shut.

But I digress, homelessness and panhandling, those are big city problems. They don’t affect us here.

In Whistler, the Christmas lights are twinkling in the village, the stores and restaurants are in the festive spirit (despite the fact that we have no snow), and everything looks picture postcard perfect for the hordes of tourists that are still expected to descend around about this time.

But despite Whistler’s glossy veneer, there is a dark underside.

Whistler has problems of its own this time of year; problems which have been exacerbated by the lack of snow and the fact that stores, restaurants and the mountain are not fully staffed yet.

While there are no ski bums bundled into sleeping bags, crouched under village awnings for shelter, tarnishing that glossy image, there are a lot of hungry people in town.

Now I’m not comparing ski bum living to the desperate situation of the homeless in our city streets. Let’s face it, there are no comparisons. But there is one major parallel.

Both need a helping hand, especially at this time of year.

Food bank officials say the situation may get worse at the Whistler Food Bank if the weather doesn’t start co-operating soon.

Those pay cheques, which are a pittance at best but enough to get by, are few and far between at the moment. And savings soon dry up in Whistler.

Numbers using the food bank are high this year, with about 130 people going there for food on Monday alone.

These are just your regular average people, like you and I, waiting around for the season to really begin so that they have work and can play and live and have fun in Whistler.

A couple of weeks ago I interviewed a few young guys who were using the food bank for the first time. They were embarrassed that they had to come for food but it was shoulder season and a couple of jobs hadn’t come through yet.

They were eager to start work so that they could afford to buy their groceries, or have a few beers at night and have fun in Whistler.

They weren’t scamming the system like all those supposedly homeless people in Toronto raking in the dough panhandling in the pre Christmas season.

The spirit of Christmas is sometimes hard to find these days (it would seem that it’s completely absent in some seats at my family dinner table).

We have lists of "Things to Buy" not to mention those lists of "Things I Want."

We might think that those twinkling lights and those tinny Christmas tunes embody the Christmas spirit, but that’s not where you find it.

It’s right there in the food bank bins stuffed to the brim at Nesters.

The Food Bank does their big drive at this time of year to stockpile groceries for the coming year.

I dropped two cans of soup into the collection bin outside the Grocery Store last Friday.

Those two cans hardly seemed like enough when you think of how many people need to have a bowl of warm soup to get by in the next few weeks.

Donate to the Food Bank today at The Grocery Store, Nesters or IGA.