HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JESUS.

by Bob Ramsay

You’d think we’d be out of breath by now. Two thousand and twenty five candles.

But every December, no matter how wired or worried the world feels, it stops, takes a collective breath and wishes a peasant baby born under Roman occupation a happy birthday.

Somehow, people are still RSVPing. Millions on the guest list don’t believe in the birthday boy. Millions more of us attend out of habit or the faint echo of a childhood choir ringing in our ears. That’s the thing about birthdays: you don’t need to believe in them to celebrate them – because life, any life, is still the most astonishing thing there is.

For me the question always is, how can we make this Christmas stay in our minds ‘til next Christmas? Not by helping ourselves to more turkey and pudding. But by helping someone else enjoy theirs. Here’s how I‘m thinking about that.

A huge majority of Canadians are living paycheque-to-paycheque, up from 60% last year to 85% this year. Worse, 42% of us are $200 away from insolvency at the end of each month.

I’m betting that you’re not in those numbers.

Like me, you’ll stare at them, disbelieving, and mutter: “That’s terrible. Those poor people. I must be sure to send them some money.”

But for whatever reason, we don’t send it, or our plans for a big amount shrivel when we think of all those other things we can do with our money and our time.

But this Christmas of all Christmases, when the rich and the poor barely glance at each other, when institutional hatred seems to win out over individual love, I ask you to think of doing things like this:

1. Buy four $25 Tim Hortons’ gift cards and give each to someone who sleeps on the street. That will buy them three hot meals for a day. Sure, they can trade them for a quick high, but they can eat too.

2. Donate to your local women’s shelter. Violence against women is the women’s issue. Why do these shelters have to beg for funds not to go broke over the holidays? Infuriating.

3. Donate to your local food bank, which is now the table stakes of citizenship.

4. Call 911 when you see someone in a Fentanyl Fold and they fall over.

5. Feel free to buy your loved one a $1,000 diamond or a day at the spa…provided you also donate $1,000 more to the food bank, women’s shelter or public library. Carbon-burning gas projects have environmental offsets. Indulgence projects should have privilege offsets.

6. One night this month, order dinner for 20 to the maternity unit at your nearest hospital…plus the workers at your nearest hospice, retirement residence and street clinic. This will cost you $2,000.

7. If you have a billion dollars, donate 0.1% of your fortune to a small charity that’s not on your map and likely wouldn’t pass your foundation’s giving hurdles. Your million dollars will change the course of their existence and transform their clients’ lives for the rest of their lives.

8. On Christmas Eve, leave milk and cookies for Santa Claus as my late dad, who died in 1973, taught me to do, and as I do for him every year.

Christmas is our collective insistence that life matters, that birth is worth applause, and that hope is worth rehearsing again and again, no matter how bad our voices or sweaters.

So, happy birthday, Jesus. Thank you for giving us the excuse, the table and the carols. We’re at the best birthday party ever thrown, and the ticket price as always, is kindness.

Meanwhile…

1. Who you gonna call? Here’s the company that spirited Nobel Peace Prize winnerMaria Corina Machado out of Venezuela into the Grand Hotel in Oslo, nearly in time for her Nobel Prize. The mission of Grey Bull Rescue is to “rescue Americans and our allies when no one else can at the speed of need.”

But there’s one person they can never rescue.

2. The Doctor is in. Dr. Peter Attia is one of the few doctors who flogs his books, videos and talks and whose science is impeccable. Here’s his ‘oldies-but-goodies’ blog from the past year on drinking and living longer, aging in quick bursts, exercise for real results,hormone therapy, and why the “cholesterol paradox” is an idea with no substance.

Another professional in a field of low-bar strivers is Harvard’s Arthur Brooks, who studies what makes us happy, not after a night on the town, but over the course of our lives. He’s created “The Happiness Scale” which condenses his books and talks into a number and a goal. It’s not free, but at US$14.99, it’s a cheap way to find enduring happiness.

3. Can we teach machines to trust each other? Of all the big questions AI is pushing humans to answer, this is one of the most urgent.While AI mainly reacts to prompts and follows instructions (like booking flights), artificial general intelligence (AGI), when it arrives, will be more advanced, humanlike, and react proactively. You might say it will think and act for itself.

But if you think we don’t have enough guardrails for how humans should use AI generally, the fact is we don’t even have a hand-shaking protocol between different kinds of AGI, each one itself likely a complex collection of agents.

AGI Ethics News is working to make us more aware of just how risky our world will be without some effective ethics around AGI, and is exploring how to create and enforce them. It’s free to subscribe.

On the good side of AI, when it learns the why of something, it becomes smarter and more responsible. Also, the first AI models are now analyzing language as well as a human expert.

4. Happy starts and stops. It seems kids make you much happier, until they’re born. Except maybe this kid. At the other end of life’s teeter-totter, there’s a choir who sings to people on their deathbeds. Plus a 15-minute documentary on the final case of a 99-year-old lawyer.

5. Extractive capitalism. A visual essay on how it worked with slavery. Plus, how playing Santa does strange things to a man…and how maths can help you wrap presents better. And who the new head of MI6 thinks will invade Britain.

6. Just sign here. The Colonel who signed the peace document on Canada’s behalf ending World War II with Japan, screwed things up. Here’s the story of Lawrence Cosgrove.

7. To be treated badly by someone you love. Here are 144 words on what that costs. And what happens when you’re treated well by someone who doesn’t know you at all.

8. The most…Profitable companies in the world…valuable NHL Teams this season (#1 is The Leafs at $4.1 billion. Who knew?)...European colonies by country…expensive drugs in America…at-risk cities for a housing crash (Toronto is #8 globally)...and the countries with the most spoken languages.

9. Based on a true story. When you read those words, no matter how unlikely the tale, you likely go, “But it’s true!” “It really happened!” Maybe. What if it’s not true, but just “true-ish?” Now of course, there’s an app for that.

10. What I’m liking. First, Harry Malcolmson’s book on the Toronto art scene in the 1960s. In that decade, the cramped AGO and National Gallery bloomed. Abstract art,Jewish Art, American Art, and not just Europe-nodding colonial art.

Malcolmson, now 92, is a retired lawyer and the former art critic for the Toronto Telegram.

Also, this year marks the 100^th anniversary of The New Yorker and Netflix has a truly compelling documentary on the magazine that still finds a large avid readership. What’s not to love in a magazine that denies it’s elitist, but insists on spelling the word with an “accent aigu” like this: élitist.