Everyone looks so harried these days. Everywhere I go and everyone I talk to seems to have a million things to do, and all before the holiday. 12 days left, don’t ya know. At work, there’s the extra tasks everyone must do to be ready for the absence of many workers at the end of the month. Let’s not forget shopping, at lunchtime, the underground city is a madhouse, like the streets of New York. But the look on everyone’s face is so stressed! Not the holly jollyness that would match the piped in holiday music everywhere.

I had to get out, it felt like a pressure cooker down there. So I popped up to street level and bought some hot roasted chestnuts from the vendor at Square Phillips. I felt the chilly wind on my cheeks and admired the festive decorations on the La Baie department store building. There was an old man tossing bread crumbs to the pigeons and I started to get a better sense of the holiday spirit.