The Christmas my dad almost burned the church down |
Christmas is coming, and with its myriad decisions to make is the one about Christmas services: which one, what time, do we even go anymore? As this time of year gains on us, I’m reminded of my father, now passed, a small-town Saskatchewan United Church minister, and how, in the early 1970s, he gave in to pressure from his congregation to come up with a Christmas Eve service so parishioners didn’t have to drag themselves away from the tree on Christmas morning.
But after only a few years, even that novelty grew stale. What to do? Well, the old boy had a brainwave. We had recently built a family cabin in the nearby Cypress Hills, so he drove up there and hunted out a big log from the forest floor. Someone must have helped him load it up, because by the time I got home for the holidays — I was in my early 20s at this point — he had it up on two sawhorses at the front of the church, right in front of the pews.
Δ
Next, he took his drill and bored over a........