Happy Birthday, Christmas, Saturnalia, Sol Invictus, Sunny Ways Days... All the Festivities, Katie, to Canada's very own princes of peace, Justin & Sacha Trudeau. No, they're not twins like the Property Brothers, but you'd be forgiven for thinking so; two years separates them, but little else.
💕 🎄 🎂 🇨🇦
Because like twins they're close to one another but pretty divergent personality-wise. Sacha, the quiet brother, picked an ideal career for someone who prefers to stay behind the scenes: he became a writer and a documentary filmmaker. Justin the extrovert, meanwhile, became, well... you know.
And so the first of Maggie Magdalene's two December babies has been making the rounds of the interview circuit talking about flickers of hope for next year, after what has been a mostly miserable and decidedly un-miraculous 2020. Mostly the media is obnoxious and doesn't relay the gospel of St. Pierre very well to the faithful or the unconverted. So instead I'll just let the messenger speak his own words as we get ready for the, um, holy writ to drop.
Here's Rosie Barton being Canada nice:
Here's Evan Solomon being... less of a dickbro than usual, just for the holidays, I guess. (Had to get in a WeGhazi dig, though. And a little JAQing off to Skippy the Pigeon's conspiracy theories. Dude, WTF?)
Anyway, here's a summary of Rosie's interview and the full transcript from Evan's. (As of this writing, I haven't yet been able to locate on YouTube the other of the Canadian Big Three networks' year-end interviews, from The West Block at Global News. I'll link it here if/when they do, but as I plan on going into further detail about over the holiday Parliament break, I'm not a fan of Fox-Lite North at all...)
UPDATE 26 December: Here's Global's The West Block, featuring Justin growing out his 1980s rock musician hair again. (Jesus Christ, Canada, since when is Kenny Loggins your prime minister?)
Finally, on a more upbeat note, here's a pretty damn awesome photo retrospective from Adam Scotti (bandwidth warning!), and the annual tradition going on some twenty years of Justin's visit to buddy and Montreal DJ Terry DiMonte, where he talks about vaccines and Die Hard... and mom. As Susan Delacourt recounts from excerpts of the friends' fireside chat, this year has been especially tough on poor Margaret — and that's even aside from narrowly escaping a house fire, and then having her name dragged through the mud by her son's jealous adversaries like a common Hunter Biden:
Trudeau also said that his mother, Margaret, has been having a hard time over the past year. He didn’t go into details, but hinted that the pandemic has put a strain on her much-publicized struggles with mental health.
“She’s not doing great,” Trudeau said. “She’s in Montreal and she’s going to be alone for Christmas and I’m not going to see her.”
His mother, he said, is normally “the champion of Christmas,” overseeing the turkey, the stuffing and the carrots mixed with turnips that only she and the prime minister appear to enjoy.
“It’s really tough, but you know, these are the things that families are having to go through … Doing Christmas without my mom, knowing that she’s just a two-hour drive away, yet knowing that it might as well be light-years away.”
Light-years away. (You know he wanted to say a galaxy far, far away.) Justin may not be Home Alone inside that replica of the McCallister brick house, but he sure does miss his mom. (Even if she's not in Florida and he in New York.) The only upside is that if all goes according to plan, Margaret is sure to be on a high-priority list for the first groups of Canadians to be vaccinated, not because she's the PM's mother but because she's elderly and has chronic health conditions. And that because of (certain) wonders of technology like Zoom, Face Time, and the old-fashioned telephone, even if he can't reach out and touch somebody's hand, Maggie's boy child born on Christmas day is only...
It's been real, it's been tough, and it's been real tough. But hopefully next year and beyond holds brighter days ahead, not just for the Trudeau family, the Liberal government, and people in the country of Canada, but others in their orbit — especially a now (or soon-to-be) Trump-less United States.
As I've said before, until then, we'll fuddle-duddle through somehow.
So Justin (and Sacha), have yourselves a happy Christmas birthday now.
Another year older and a new one's just begun... fuck 2020 and on to 2021!
