AS a person with a short but unusual surname, I'm often asked "What kind of name is Kives?" as a roundabout way of ascertaining my ethnic background.
The simple answer is, I'm an Eastern European Jew. But the long version is a lot more interesting, at least from a storytelling perspective: I'm a Polish-Belarussian-Turkish-Israeli Jewish Canadian born and raised in the Anglo-founded capital of a Métis-created province carved out of the borders between traditional Sioux, Cree and Ojibway territory.
Bartley Kives with his grandfather, who fled the Nazis in 1938.
Questions of identity consume my thoughts around Christmas, the only time of year I feel like a minority inside the only country I've ever called home.
Though many people view the holiday as a strictly secular occasion, the reality is it's very difficult to separate the Christ from Christmas if you're part of the growing minority of Canadians of non-Christian heritage.
Jews are not really part of this trend. My ethnic group comprises less than two per cent of Winnipeg's population, down from slightly more than four per cent in the early 1960s.
But as the Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist population of this city and this country continue to grow, there will soon come a time when Christmas becomes just one of several important holidays on the calendar, as opposed to the only day when the entire country shuts down, aside from movie theatres and the odd Chinese and Vietnamese restaurant.
This inevitability is a simple consequence of demographic change. As a nation desperate for immigrants -- in Manitoba, new Canadians and aboriginals account for almost all of our growth -- we continue to open our doors to people from places where Santa Claus and decorated trees simply do not exist.
There are severely conservative elements who insist these symbols must remain part of the Canadian identity, no matter what. They see Canada's increasing ethnocultural diversity as a threat, and write ignorant essays and paranoid letters about mythical "attacks on Christmas," as if people who do not celebrate the holiday somehow seek to prevent Christians -- both secular and religious -- from pouring eggnog and singing carols.
The reality is that every single nation on the planet is in a constant change of demographic flux. People move in and people move out, sometimes motivated by simple economic necessity, but mostly because of the complex and often ghastly interaction of population growth on scarce resources in other parts of the world.
Canada has been dominated by people from Christian lands for only several hundred years. If current immigration patterns continue, the Christian character of this country may prove to be a historical blip.
If this change occurs gradually, there is nothing for Christians to fear. It's only sudden demographic changes that stain humanity as a species.
My own home here in the centre of the country has been shaped by genocide and war. The First Nations who always dwelled here were first displaced and then forced to settle down. The mostly European immigrants who followed fled places where mass killings occurred on a scale previously unseen in human history.
That may not be a cheery thought a couple of days before Christmas, but you can not untangle history from identity, especially if you're an Eastern European Jew -- and a glum one at that at this particular moment, I must admit.
Earlier this week, my maternal grandfather died in hospital at the remarkable age of 96. His story is unusual, yet typical of the Canadian experience: Raised in a Polish village that's no longer part of Poland, he and my grandmother avoided the Nazi horror at almost the last possible moment by taking a train ride through Berlin in 1938, bribing officials for passage down to Italy and the Mediterranean, where a ship transported them to the coast of what would later become Israel.
Sneaking ashore past British soldiers under orders to prevent more Jews from entering what was then Palestine, my grandfather briefly lived on a kibbutz but my grandmother soon tired of communal life. He moved his family to Canada in 1951 and spent most of his life tending a small grocery store in Elmwood, returning to Israel following the death of his wife -- but then re-immigrating to Canada to live out his twilight years in a cooler, drier climate.
My grandfather was not a religious man. He was an idealistic, secular socialist who believed in individual people but not necessarily humanity, a perspective that managed to skip a generation and define my world view.
In Canada, he lived out his life in peace, free from ethnic or religious persecution. This is something many Canadians take for granted, despite recent reports that racism and intolerance are on the rise.
Personally, I don't believe Canada has become less tolerant. Our growing diversity has merely made a tiny but vocal minority of bigots feel threatened by change.
People who celebrate Christmas have no reason to fear the future, despite the fact it's destined to recede in importance. There will always be Christmas trees in Canada, because there will always be people of Christian heritage in the country.
As long as we all remember where we come from and respect everybody else, we'll be OK as a country. And that's a message everyone can adopt at a very spiritual time of year, regardless of what we do or don't believe or how short of long our surnames happen to be.
bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca
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