By Dec. 25, we can expect around 425 Yukon babies to be celebrating their first Yukon holiday season.
We don’t know the exact number, since babies are notoriously unreliable.
Last year, just 26 babies decided to arrive in December versus 39 or one-and-a-half times more in November.
Maybe, like many, they dreaded the stress of the holiday season.
Those that do arrive in time will enjoy – well, sleep or squirm through – a wonderfully diverse array of Yukon holiday customs.
Some will snooze beside the wood stove in a cozy Yukon cabin as others unwrap all the Ski-Doo onesies Santa left for them under the Christmas tree.
Some will play the role of the crying baby at church services, while others will do so from deep inside their snowsuits at candle-lit Solstice processions in the forest. Still others will spend some quiet time with parents taking the statutory holidays after already celebrating Diwali, Hanukkah or another holiday.
Some babies will even get to enjoy their first night sleeping on the floor under fluorescent lights in a blizzard-bound airport as their harried parents take them to see Outside grandparents.
We recently had a baby arrive in our family just in time for Christmas. She will be the fifth generation of our family to grow up in Whitehorse. Given that her great-great-grandfather grew up here when the wilderness started at Sixth Avenue and they waved the British flag at school, it makes you wonder what the Yukon will look like when she grows up.
The mind boggles at the possibilities. She may never get a driver’s license, since self-driving cars may make the idea of steering your own vehicle as quaint to her as riding a horse to work would be for us.
Maybe she’ll invent a robo-snowblower that does all our driveways while we sleep.
Even more outlandishly, maybe she’ll see the Vancouver Canucks win the Stanley Cup.
I hope she doesn’t understand the racism and social conflict that upsets us in 2023, much as my own children were deeply puzzled to hear about how controversial it was when my grandparents — an English-speaking Anglican and a French-Canadian Catholic — got married in Whitehorse in the 1930s.
Where will she and her Grad ‘41 pals work? Will she talk to her mining drills at Casino like Luke Skywalker talked to the droids fixing his uncle’s moisture condensers on Tatooine? Will she coach high school students at F.H. Collins 3 on how to get the most out of their personal learning avatars? Or will she do communications for Phase 32 of the Yukon Government’s Family Doctor Waiting List program?
What will work even look like when she is in mid-career? Her great-great-grandfather usually worked six days a week and was invariably wearing a tie and jacket. Maybe the robots will have made themselves useful and allowed us to cut back to three- or four-day work weeks. I wonder if she will talk to her grandmother about how women are, still, getting paid less and harassed at work.
How will she feel about supporting her grandparents after they blow all their money on crypto investments and following Taylor Swift on her world tour?
Yukon society will undoubtedly be very different. If the population keeps growing at last year’s two per cent rate, by the time she is 50 the Yukon will have 120,000 people. The Umbrella Final Agreement will have been in place for 80 years, about as far in the rearview mirror for her in 2073 as World War Two is for us today. Her children may think we were barbarians for cheerfully slathering barbeque sauce on animals and eating them. She will shudder at how obliviously we kept on emitting planet-altering clouds of carbon dioxide for years after Al Gore filmed An Inconvenient Truth.
But that is far in the future. In the meantime, the arrival of a new baby is a reminder to take a break from work over the holidays and focus on family.
We should also remember that some of those 425 babies were born to the 2,868 non-babies who moved to the Yukon since last Christmas (taking mid-2023 numbers and annualizing them). We gained 478 students and other temporary foreign residents, 677 foreign immigrants and 1,713 immigrants from other Canadian provinces and territories.
Many of them are spending their first holiday season in the Yukon, far from old friends and family.
So spread the good cheer with your new neighbours.
Share the tips they need to know, like if Santa hides the presents in the shed then on Christmas morning the mandarin oranges in the stockings will be as solid as cannon balls. That they only have a five hour and 39 minute window of daylight to get a good family photo. Or that, contrary to rumour, the median of Lewes Boulevard is not the place to get your Christmas tree.
If they are going back Outside for the holidays, make sure they know what the bleeder in the basement of their new house is, and suggest they double check that the kids closed all the bathroom windows before they head to the airport.
And remember one cheerful thought as we adults struggle with inflation, interest rates and global chaos: when those 425 babies grow up, most of them will think of 2023 as the good old days.
Keith Halliday is a Yukon economist, author of the Aurore of the Yukon youth adventure novels and co-host of the Klondike Gold Rush History podcast. He won the 2022 Canadian Community Newspaper Award for Outstanding Columnist.