The thinning of the “Veil Between the Worlds” – All Souls’ Day marks the end of the Allhallowtide triduum

I’m a fan of The Gap in the Curtain, a 1932 novel by the Scottish author John Buchan, the 1st Baron Tweedsmuir, who served as Governor General of Canada between 1935 and 1940. It is a novel about the thinning of the veil at certain times between the worlds of the living and the dead. As an aside, my favourite G.K. Chesterton quote, taken from his 1908 book Orthodoxy, which he described as a “spiritual autobiography,” is “Tradition is the democracy of the dead. It means giving a vote to the most obscure of all classes: our ancestors.”  

My supernatural story of the thinning of the veil involves the late Rhonda Payne; a story involving an obscure fridge magnet, of all things, and stretching from Halifax to Yellowknife. Rhonda, author of the play Stars in the Sky Morning, a tale of the hardships of women on the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland – a playwright the National Post described as a “national treasure” in 1999 – was a fiery actor, writer, director, producer and activist from Curling, Newfoundland, who would go onto co-found Ground Zero Productions with Don Bouzek in Toronto, and after that Riverbank Productions in Peterborough on Parkhill Road East (the studio office was quite literally on the banks of the Otonabee River.) She died in Halifax in June 2002. No saints or miracles in my story, but an experience 20 years ago that sent a chill up my spine like I’ve never felt before.

In late June 2002, I was living in Yellowknife. Rhonda had died in early June at the tragically young age of 52 in Halifax, where she had been living since 2000. She had been ill only a short time.

I had known Rhonda since November 1997 when she lived on Parkhill Road East in Peterborough and she was running Riverbank Productions, her theatre company. I had arrived back in Peterborough seven months earlier to begin a second tour of duty at the Peterborough Examiner. I met Rhonda at a dinner party and found her to be one of the most vivacious guests I have ever met under such circumstances. That’s still true today.

Rhonda was a big, and at times, tumultuous, presence in my life for the next several years. I learned of her illness in late May 2002 when I was vacationing in Iowa. Instead of returning to Yellowknife as planned, I re-booked and caught perhaps the most convoluted flight plan ever that saw me backtrack through Minneapolis, Calgary and Edmonton before finally catching flights east to Moncton, and then driving to Halifax from my mother’s place in Amherst, Nova Scotia, to visit Rhonda at the Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre. She was well enough that day to talk and go for a short walk down the hospital corridor, but she died six days later, and three days after I had returned to Yellowknife.

Several weeks later, near the end of June, a young reporter, Christine Kay, who was from Ontario, I believe, but had just graduated from the journalism program at University of King’s College in Halifax, arrived in Yellowknife to start her first reporting job in the newsroom of Northern News Services Limited (NNSL). We gave her a desk that had been cleaned out and empty for some time.

What happened next, I still recall almost in slow motion. Near the end of her first day, Christine walked over to my desk (which was across the newsroom from hers, with numerous editors and reporters between our two desks, and I was not her direct supervisor as a news editor, and she knew none of us anyway) and held out her hand to me, and said, “I found this in my desk and didn’t know what to do with it.”

What she handed me from her desk drawer, from a supposedly cleaned out and empty desk, was the only thing she had discovered when she was unpacking her stuff into her new desk: a small fridge magnet. Although hard to describe precisely in a visual sense after 18 years, it was symbolically at least, no ordinary or common fridge magnet. It was identical to a fridge magnet I had only seen once before – in Rhonda’s kitchen on her fridge door on Parkhill – and have never seen again since that day in the newsroom Yellowknife in late June 2002, about three weeks after she died: The fridge magnet resembled a Celtic priestess perhaps performing a Beltane Day dance.

My immediate and involuntary reaction was to blanche, as if I had seen a ghost, which shocked poor Christine Kay, who had simply handed me a fridge magnet of unknown provenance she had discovered in a drawer in her new desk.

At that moment, I came to a profound understanding of the concept of the thinning of the “Veil Between the Worlds,” so rooted in the history and tradition of the the Allhallowtide triduum, and recalling for me All Souls’ Days from almost a decade earlier, from 1993 to 1995, when I studied graduate history in the master’s program at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and would reflect and pray on what was often this time of year a gray fall day in the Limestone City at St. James Chapel, adjacent to St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception Cathedral of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Kingston on Johnson Street.

It stands to this day as a unique episode in my life experience. My hunch is the answer to this rogue coincidence, if indeed there is an answer, might be discovered somewhere on the western shore of the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland and Labrador, between Cow Head and Daniel’s Harbour, the ground of Rhonda’s being. There is much beyond the material world, far beyond my ken.

Halloween has roots in an ancient Irish festival called Samhain.

It is often associated with Los Dias de Muertos or “Days of the Dead” in Latin America. Almost 19 years ago, I wrote a story on Nov. 10, 2004 for The Independent, a weekly newspaper in Brighton, Ont., noting monarch butterflies in the fall of 2004 had started “arriving in central Mexico last week, on the first of November, at the same time as the national festival of Los Dias de Muertos or Days of the Dead (https://web.archive.org/web/20041208020154/http://www.eastnorthumberland.com/news/news2004/November/041110monarch.html).

For the local people, monarch butterflies are ‘old souls’ returning to the sacred mountains,” I wrote.

All Souls’ Day is a day to honour and pray for the dead who are believed to be in purgatory – the place in Roman Catholic belief in which those who have died make an elevator stop midway of varying lengths, as it were, to atone for their sins before going on the rest of the way up to heaven on the top floor. Roman Catholic belief suggests that the prayers of the faithful living on Earth – known as the Church Militant on Earth (one of my favourite descriptors for the Church, bar none) – help cleanse these souls of venial sins and help them reach heaven. Temporal punishment for sin is a punishment which will have a definite end, when the soul is purified and is permitted into heaven. Thus temporary. Temporal punishment for sin is that which is experienced in purgatory.

The day is primarily celebrated in the Catholic Church, but it is also celebrated in the Eastern Orthodox Church and a few other denominations of Christianity. The Anglican church is the largest Protestant church to recognize All Souls’ Day on Nov. 2. While considered a holy day, All Souls Day is not a holy day of obligation in the Catholic Church, where the faithful are required to attend mass.

The custom of setting apart a special day for intercession for certain of the faithful on Nov. 2 was first established by St. Odilo of Cluny at his abbey of Cluny in 998. From Cluny the custom spread to the other houses of the Cluniac order, which became the largest and most extensive network of monasteries in Europe. The celebration was soon adopted in several dioceses in France, and spread throughout the Western Church. Legend has it that a pilgrim returning from the Holy Land was cast by a storm on a desolate island. A hermit living there told him that amid the rocks was a chasm communicating with purgatory, from which perpetually rose the groans of tortured souls. The hermit also claimed he had heard the demons complaining of the efficacy of the prayers of the faithful, and especially the monks of Cluny, in rescuing their victims. Upon returning home, the pilgrim hastened to inform Odilo, the fifth Benedictine Abbot of Cluny, who set Nov. 2 as a day of intercession on the part of his community for all the souls in Purgatory.

C.S. Lewis, the noted mid-20th century Anglican Christian apologist and author, viewed purgatory primarily as a state in which the redeemed are purged of their sins before entering heaven rather than an intermediate place of retributive punishment for people with unconfessed sins, noted Jerry L. Walls, a scholar-in-residence and a philosophy professor at Houston Baptist University, in a December 2017 interview with the Plano, Texas-based Baptist Standard. “Viewed in that sense, some type of purgatory – a process that allows sanctification to be completed before an individual enters God’s presence – can be embraced ecumenically” (https://www.baptiststandard.com/news/faith-culture/c-s-lewis-believed-purgatory-heavens-sake/) said Walls, a Methodist who now attends an Episcopal church, wrote Ken Camp, managing editor of the Baptist Standard.

According to Catholic belief, the soul of a person who dies can go to one of three places. The first is heaven, where a person who dies in a state of perfect grace and communion with God goes. The second is hell, where those who die in a state of mortal sin are naturally condemned by their choice. The intermediate option is purgatory, which is thought to be where most people, free of mortal sin, but still in a state of lesser (venial) sin, must go. The primary scriptural basis for the belief is found in 2 Maccabees, 12:26 and 12:32. “Turning to supplication, they prayed that the sinful deed might be fully blotted out … Thus made atonement for the dead that they might be free from sin.” Additional references are found in Zechariah, Sirach, and the Gospel of Matthew. The first two books of Maccabees only are part of canonical scripture in the Septuagint and the Vulgate (and hence are deuterocanonical to Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy) and are included in the Protestant Apocrypha (https://www.gotquestions.org/first-second-Maccabees.html).

Most Protestant denominations, however, do not recognize purgatory, or All Souls’ Day, and disagree with the theology behind both.

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From the Missiguash River to the Mackenzie Delta, breathtaking, raw beauty

This is a land bigger than the imagination – for all of us. In the Northwest Territories, the Akaitcho say, “‘Denech’anie,’ meaning ‘the path the people walk’ and that ‘we will live on the land as long as the sun shines, the river flows, and the grass grows.”

I’ve driven across the Western Arctic’s Mackenzie Delta; summer at 68 degrees latitude and the vast, open land at the top of the world, listening to Robin Mark’s “Revival In Belfast (Hope In The City)” and Susan Aglukark’s powerfully haunting song, “E186,” about what it meant to be an “Eskimo” with a number and no name, cranked up to full volume. With its raw power, it served as a defining moment in helping me to understand, if imperfectly and incompletely, the difference in what it meant to be Inuit rather than qallunaat (which, loosely translated from Inuktitut, is not terribly flattering, as it translates a bit closer to honky than white) North of 60 in the 1940s and 1950s.

Inuvik lives for me as a kaleidoscope of snapshots. One of the most vivid standing on the shore of the mighty Mackenzie River watching a flotilla of small boats head out in miserable weather for Aklavik.

The Gwich’in and Inuvialuit were gathering to bury three of their own: Doug Irish, Larry Semmler and Charlie Meyook. Northerners, aboriginal and non-aboriginal, look after their own.

Hundreds of Gwich’in, Inuvialuit and white men travelled by river and by air from Inuvik, from McPherson, from Tsiigehtchic, from the Yukon, from Alaska and from the South for the funerals at All Saints Anglican Church in Aklavik, on the site of the original Anglican Cathedral of the Arctic. The women volunteered to cook the community feast; the men hunted caribou and dug graves, all giving aid and comfort to their brothers and sister in Aklavik.

The Northwest Territories is a vast and open land, where two of the highest virtues practiced are tolerance and respect. I’d come home from work that first October in 2001 to my apartment on the shores of Great Slave Lake, and read more and more of Bern Will Brown’s Arctic Journal and  Arctic Journal II (a colleague had wisely recommended Brown’s writing as a good introduction to the Northwest Territories).

One dark December day, l got a sense of how imaginatively the lives of the peoples of the Circumpolar North are weaved together, between glances out my balcony window before 3 p.m. darkness fell and watching Smilla’s Sense of Snow, the delightful 1997 Danish thriller starring Julia Ormond, Gabriel Byrne, and Richard Harris, based on the 1992 novel Frøken Smillas fornemmelse by Danish author Peter Høeg, with both the book and the film telling the story of a transplanted Greenlander, Smilla Jasperson, who investigates the mysterious death of a small Inuit boy who lived in her housing complex in Copenhagen. Clues send her not just around Copenhagen, including the Hotel d’Angleterre, but also to Kiruna, the northernmost town in Sweden in Lapland, and Ilulissat in western Greenland.

I remember the first time I heard Stan Rogers’ “Northwest Passage” performed in the Northwest Territories in Yellowknife, with seemingly everyone in the audience in a school auditorium raising their voices in unison to join in. One of those moments that still send chills up your spine years later. I’ve long forgotten who performed it that night some 20 years ago almost now, but I haven’t forgotten it was a Stan Rogers song, and thinking the Bard of Guysborough County was truly one of Canada’s poets, a coast-to-coast-to-coast national treasure.

We are a country blessed with national treasures. Rhonda Payne, author of the play “Stars in the Sky Morning,” a tale of the hardships of women on the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland – was a playwright the National Post described as a “national treasure” in 1999. Rhonda was a fiery actor, writer, director, producer and activist from Curling, who would go onto co-found Ground Zero Productions with Don Bouzek in Toronto, and after that Riverbank Productions in Peterborough, Ontario on Parkhill Road East (the studio office was quite literally on the banks of the Otonabee River).

From Churchill, Manitoba, I’ve had the chance to sail a beluga-populated Hudson Bay, across the invisible maritime boundary that divides Manitoba from Nunavut, and share the Seal River with polar bears. Churchill Airport was built by the United States military in 1942 and owned and operated by Transport Canada as a remote airport since 1964. Churchill Rocket Research Range, also built by the United States Army, under the aegis of Canada’s Defence Research Board in 1956, operated 23 kilometres east of town, where the Churchill Northern Studies Centre now is, until 1985.

I remember the haunting but not at all unwelcome sound of the train whistle when I would visit my mother, who lived near Amherst, Nova Scotia, on Fort Lawrence Road, east of Exit 1, as the Via Rail Ocean passenger train, en route from Montréal to Halifax, or Halifax to Montréal, crossed the saltwater Tantramar marshes between Amherst, Nova Scotia and Sackville, New Brunswick, a stone’s throw from the Missiguash River, bordering New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and connecting the Nova Scotia peninsula with those who come from away elsewhere in North America.

The saltwater Tantramar marshes, sometimes referred to singularly as the Tantramar Marsh, is a very special place indeed, and was even long before the first train crossed it in the 19th century. Memory surrounds you everywhere in Nova Scotia. This is the soil my Acadian ancestors lived and laboured on. All I have to do is close my eyes for but a moment listening to Lorena McKennitt’s The Mystic’s Dream and I clearly hear the words, “All along the English shore,” and in my mind’s eye I see the Acadian tricolor of blue, white and red, the gold star Stella Maris at top left, seeking the guidance and protection of the Virgin Mary, patron of the Acadians.

This is Aulac Ridge, a prominent rise running west to east across the Tantramar marshes on the Isthmus of Chignecto, just west of the Missiguash River. This is the demarcation line between Fort Lawrence and Fort Beauséjour, New France and British North America, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, overlooking the Cumberland Basin of the Bay of Fundy.

Nowhere, of course, in the song are the words, “All along the English shore” actually heard, not even as a mondegreen where you mishear the lyrics to a song, which is a sort of aural malapropism, where instead of saying the wrong word, you hear the wrong word as a result of near-homophony, in a way that gives it a new meaning. No, this, as it was for Marcel Proust, is remembrance of things past.

I spent a balmy Maritime spring evening reporting from Middle Musquodoboit Harbour on the Eastern Shore’s Musquodoboit Harbour River, while I’ve travelled deep in the woods near Earltown in Colchester County, on the north slope of the Cobequid Mountains, searching for Willard Kitchener MacDonald, the so-called “Hermit of Gully Lake,” who had gone AWOL in 1945 after being conscripted and abandoning a troop train during the Second World War. Canada declared an amnesty for army deserters in 1950, but MacDonald, retained a lifelong suspicion of government and police. In the same area, I later returned to Sugar Moon Farm, also near Earltown, in search of maple syrup stories, while travelling the back roads of Folly Lake-Folly Gap-Folly Mountain, and through the Cobequid Mountains and Wentworth Valley to Londonderry, formerly known as Acadia Mines, in Colchester County, where time appeared to have stood still.

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Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, but beware the Ghost of Christmas Eve newsroom Baileys Irish Cream liqueur

 In response to a query, I wrote here yesterday about my usual Christmastime traditions over the years, and how some of my traditions date back many years, while others are of much more recent vintage, and are perhaps best described as being on the road to becoming tradition, although exactly where that demarcation line is drawn, is not completely clear to me. Christmas traditions are important, but not immutable, I think. To some extent, they seem to me to be dependent on where we are both in life, as it were, and geography, which even in a very virtual world, still matters.

While I touched on food, be it sausage meat dressing or stuffing for Jeanette’s perfectly cooked juicy Christmas turkey, Land O’Lakes sour cream cornbread, Christmas fruitcake, whether it be from the monks of Le Magasin de l’Abbayea Val Notre-Dame in Saint-Jean-de-Matha, Quebec, or my local Safeway’s honey and ground almond marzipan-icing topped offerings; as well as the classic Christmas movie genre, I might well have added a few more traditions I developed over the years that festively often blended the personal and professional, private and public.

Ecclesiastes (hello Qoheleth, hello King Solomon?) had it about right, I think, when whosoever he was wrote, “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” In terms of the Christmas season for many that means travelling long miles only to be thrust together in close quarters with other annually seasonally-close family members and friends who hold somewhat different cultural, political, sports or even religious beliefs than you do. In terms of the latter, this happens even among Christians, hard as that may be to believe, marking the birth of our saviour some 2,000-plus years ago in Bethlehem – or is it Nazareth? Take your pick. The Gospels of Saint Matthew and Saint Luke opt for Bethlehem, while Saint Mark and Saint John seem to lean more toward Nazareth.

As for the year, month or day of Jesus’ birth, you can likely rule out Dec. 25 for the latter two and settle on sometime between 7BC and 4BC for the year. Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI, in his book, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, published in November 2012, wrote Jesus was born several years earlier than commonly believed because the entire Christian calendar is based on a miscalculation by a sixth-century monk known as Dionysius Exiguus, or in English, Dennis the Small.

Fast-forward a couple of thousand years and it is Christmas 1996. I am working as the managing editor of The Kingston Net-Times, during the pioneering days of Canadian online journalism. From day one, we published no print edition and our local stories in that groundbreaking digital newspaper were updated on the fly throughout the day, but there were few bells and whistles, as very, very few of our online readers had cable broadband internet in 1996. Who remembers dial-up?

On Christmas Day 1996, I was called at home by a father who read us online and wondered if we could take a few minutes to put up the famous “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus,” letter to the editor and the editorial response for his young daughter.

The letter and editorial had long been in the public domain. So we did. On Christmas Day. Eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon wrote the long-ago letter to the editor of the New York Sun, and the quick response was printed as an unsigned editorial Sept. 21, 1897. The response of veteran newsman Francis Pharcellus Church has since become history’s most reprinted newspaper editorial.

The following year at Christmas 1997, I was back in Peterborough, Ontario at the Peterborough Examiner, a print-only daily newspaper back in those days, where I had worked previously from 1985 to 1989. During my first stint, I was the court beat reporter. Now, I was the city hall reporter. The Examiner, of course, was the paper Robertson Davies edited between 1942 and 1955. It was while editing the Peterborough Examiner that Davies, considered by townspeople as an eccentric bearded figure in the small-town world of Peterborough in the 1940s, would establish himself as one of Canada’s most important 20th century literary figures with the creation and development of his Samuel Marchbanks character, mining his daily newspaper experiences in the Queen of the Kawarthas for many of the characters and situations, which would appear in his novels and plays.

On Dec. 23, 1997, I was at a dinner party hosted by the late playwright Rhonda Payne at her home on Parkhill Road East in Peterborough. I had met Rhonda, author of the play “Stars in the Sky Morning,” a tale of the hardships of women on the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland, a month earlier at Karen Hicks – at another dinner party. The National Post described Rhonda in 1999 as a “national treasure” and if ever there was a bon vivant, it was Rhonda, which is why the evening was so convivial and is perhaps what induced me to have more red wine at dinner than I might normally during the work week. You see, the Examiner had a long tradition of its own of granting employees what was quaintly termed “early leaving” at noon on both Christmas Eve and New Years Eve. What’s an extra glass, or maybe even two, of red, I thought to myself? Tomorrow is Christmas Eve, and really, how hard can it be? All I have to do is more or less physically show up in the newsroom for the half-day morning.

When I got home from Rhonda’s dinner party that night, the red light was flashing repeatedly and rapidly on my old General Electric answering machine (I think voicemail existed, but was still in its early years). It seemed odd to have so many messages awaiting receipt, but I went ahead and pushed the play button. Lo and behold it was Jim Hendry, then city editor of the Examiner, telling me that there was going to be a press conference at 8 a.m. Dec. 24 at the Peterborough County courthouse with City of Peterborough and County of Peterborough officials on hand to answer questions about the province seizing welfare files earlier in the day on Dec. 23. Many of the details are blurry after 22 years, but I believe welfare was perhaps a shared city-county municipal responsibility in those days, and the province was intent on upsetting that apple cart through shifting responsibilities and financial obligations between the two entities in what was called “downloading” in the days of the Harris government.

I barely survived the press conference. Once back in the second-floor newsroom of the old Peterborough Examiner building at Hunter and Water streets, I quickly picked up the telephone on my desk, across from Jack Marchen, then the court reporter, to give the late Ron Chittick, then chief administrative officer of the City of Peterborough, a quick call before he vanished for Christmas, as I realized back in the office I had a couple of unanswered questions still. Jack Marchen had been sitting across the desk from me in the newsroom when I left in August 1989 and he was still sitting across the desk from me when I returned. Phil Tyson, who sat beside me when I left, was also sitting beside me when I returned.

Time elapsed had foolishly led me to forget one of Jack’s Christmas traditions, which I should have remembered from the 1980s. But eight years had passed since then and there had been the dinner party the previous evening. Jack, unofficially, of course, and off-the-record, if anyone asks, traditionally would walk around the newsroom the morning of Christmas Eve, a bottle of Baileys Irish Cream liqueur and white Styrofoam coffee cups in hand, to pass out some Christmas cheer to his friends and colleagues.

I’m not sure what I was thinking, or even if I was thinking, but I happily accepted my coffee cup full of Baileys, as Jack handed it to me, which in all fairness kind of looked like a cup of coffee for those like myself, who go heavy on the cream. I slugged it back in one gulp, which does in retrospect seem kind of odd if I actually thought it might be hot coffee, and my brain froze instantaneously – mid-sentence, mid-question to Ron. For a thirty-second eternity, or so it seemed, there was dead air on the phone line as I failed to articulate the remainder of the question I was posing to Ron.

That, friends, was tradition and Christmas Eve 1997.

A decade later, editing the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News weekly newspapers here in Northern Manitoba, I resumed publishing the “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” letter to the editor from 2007 to 2013, below a bold-faced and italicized introduction, which read:

“Editor’s note: Eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Sun, and the quick response was printed as an unsigned editorial Sept. 21, 1897. The response of veteran newsman Francis Pharcellus Church has since become history’s most reprinted newspaper editorial. We, at the Thompson Citizen, are pleased to be part of that tradition and republishing it at Christmas has become an annual hallmark of the festive season for us here as well since Dec. 19, 2007. Merry Christmas, one and all.

John Barker.”

You can read it in full here at: https://www.thompsoncitizen.net/opinion/editorial/yes-virginia-there-is-a-santa-claus-1.1367424

While at the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News, I also much enjoyed re-printing Garwood Robb’s “A special gift from years ago” as a guest “Soundings” column on the editorial page around Christmas. It opens: “My first teaching assignment was in Thompson in 1968. Mary was a student of mine. She was from an extremely poor and dysfunctional family who lived on the edge of town about a quarter mile from the town’s railway station.

“On the last day of school before Christmas holidays many of the students brought me gifts….”

The column was first published in the Grandview Exponent, which serves the communities of Grandview and Gilbert Plains in the Parkland region of Manitoba, on Dec. 20, 2005, and later republished in Garwood Robb’s blog, “In My Own Words,” which can be found online at either: http://garwood2009.blogspot.ca/2009/12/memory-from-long-agorevisited.html or https://www.thompsoncitizen.net/opinion/columnists/soundings-1.1360060

Garwood lived on Centennial Drive East in Thompson and taught at Westwood Elementary School from September 1968 to June 1972 when he moved to Winnipeg.

And while it is likely too soon to call it a tradition, I’ve become rather fond in recent years of re-posting on Facebook at least two YouTube videos: “Mog’s Christmas Calamity,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuRn2S7iPNU&feature=share) based on author and illustrator Judith Kerr’s Mog, who first appeared in the book “Mog the Forgetful Cat,” in 1970, and who falls asleep on Christmas Eve, and unwittingly creates unimaginable chaos, leading the Thomas family to fear that Christmas will have to be cancelled, and Igniter Media’s “A Social Network Christmas,” an artistic take on how the story of the nativity might have read had a social network existed at the time of Jesus’s birth, which you will find here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sghwe4TYY18

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