The Miracle at Guildford Mall

[Editor’s note: ‘Upon a Midnight Clear’ is an essay collection edited by Vancouver author JJ Lee. The book features the work of regional authors sharing true stories of memorable holiday seasons. This essay, which appears in the book as ‘The Gift,’ tells us how the kindness of strangers can be life-changing.]

I put myself through school while working full time as a security guard. I attended classes by day and did an eight-hour shift until midnight at the mall.

I would ditch the university with Burnaby in my rear-view and Surrey in my sights. My ride was a gold 1980 Mazda 626. Not a spring chicken, but she held her own. No rust, no dents, engine purring like a kitten. She was my sanctuary for the 40-minute haul to the job. The speakers, a recent splurge, blasted my tunes, drowning out the world.

The Guildford mall was a behemoth that sprawled over 500 hectares, a monolith of grey concrete and brick. It had windows clouded with urban grime that, all through the early part of the fall semester, mirrored the harsh afternoon sun.

The south entrance connected to the main artery and had the most foot traffic. Inside, the air was a cocktail of fast food and stale smoke; the ghosts of a thousand stories lingering in the sealed HVAC air.

The mall was so big it sprawled north across the street, joined by an overpass, to a quieter section. There was an inconspicuous door, tucked like a secret, that opened to a stairwell that led to a janitor’s closet that had been converted to a security hub. It had the smell of a gym locker on a bad day. The guards used it as a refuge from the mall’s crowds.

The hub had a changing room, lunchroom, coffee break room and a haven for tall tales, all crammed into a windowless 40 square feet under the stairs.

On the job as security, I wasn’t a patient person.

I often did not get a great night’s sleep. I had submitted myself to a demanding schedule. I thought, back then, I had something to prove not only to myself but to all those who claimed I was not smart enough or good enough. I was a survivor.

I told my brothers time and again, “That we lived through that shit and came out the other side without criminal records, and sane enough to participate in society, is a badge of honour.”

I had trouble accepting simple kindnesses. If someone at school said, “I believe in you,” I thought that person was phoney, and the act was simply performed out of politeness.

I was proud, angry and alone. I cared for myself. In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë wrote, “The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.” That was me.

No one was going to hold me back from achieving and gaining a real sense of accomplishment except me. All this would manifest in frustration, not only with myself but with others.

A mall customer or shop owner would be explaining an incident and go into excruciating detail. Silently I would be saying, “Just get to the point.” I’m sure the occasional eye roll occurred.

As I took notes, I would do the hand-roll gesture as a way of demonstrating my impatience. I should add that, to the people I knew, I would also be very direct. I’d pretend to fall asleep or interject saying, “It all started when I was six,” or “Jesus wrote a shorter book, bro, cut to the chase.”

My tank was running on empty, and I was throwing myself the best pity party you ever saw. That’s what I was feeling when the semester ended and I agreed to work the Christmas week.

‘Just another day to me’

Everywhere I looked, there was a seasonal reminder of my inadequacy. I think everyone hopes “this Christmas will be better than the last one” and yet I always failed to prepare for it. Like it is supposed to happen spontaneously. Christmas was more or less just another day to me, or so I tried to convince myself.

Growing up, Christmas was always a tough time. My mother could barely afford to keep a roof over our heads, let alone buy presents for seven children. A reality I only understood later, when it was far too late to say it’s OK.

I was never the person who would handcraft a snow globe out of a Mason jar, acorns and unicorn tears. I saved money and did not buy gifts for people other than Christmas cards. When I received them, I tossed them in the trash soon after Christmas was over.

So, at the mall, I was apathetic toward Christmas. There were stores decorated with plastic trees and wreaths; the scent of cinnamon was everywhere.

There was a booth where people paid to have their gifts professionally wrapped. I saw these as pretentious trappings and fake paraphernalia. I took a long look around that shopping mall at the people with their packages. I got angry, almost enough to save myself from the feeling of envy. I needed that little bit of righteous anger. I remember even muttering to myself how I hated this time of year.

Staring at Santa’s Castle didn’t help. It was on a lower level at the centre of the mall where all four halls converged, a peaked house with windows on all four walls. There were Styrofoam candy canes and the usual decor over the red exterior. It was surrounded by reindeer statues in cotton snow.

I found myself peering over the edge from the upper level watching people and their children milling in and out of it. “Here Comes Santa Claus” was playing over the music system because he was due to sit on his throne.

This Santa had a real beard and looked surprisingly like the advertisement on the Coke commercials. He was also just as jolly and friendly. He played the part well and people scrambled to take a picture with him.

I thought they were entitled and pretentious; their children spoiled, overly privileged brats, ignorant of what it was like to make something out of nothing.

That somehow made me feel superior to them because they would never know what I knew. When I was a child, I thought of Santa Claus as a saviour who rescued children. Now he was just a portly man in a red suit paid to act the part created by an advertising agency.

I stood amongst these people, my bad attitude firmly intact.

When I put on that security uniform, it somehow emboldened me. I engaged in conversation with strangers: men, women, teenagers, families.

When I spoke to them, there was no expectation. I never knew how they were going to respond — or even if they were going to respond — but they always felt compelled to reply because I was an employee of the mall.

I would notice a certain shop that they just visited, then say something like, “I love that store, bought my last pair of shoes there, super comfortable.”

Sometimes that would lead to more conversation, sometimes not. I really had no ulterior motive, other than to either confirm or change my first impression. I met all the women that I dated this way but, like I said, this was never my intention.

I struck up a conversation with an older woman going to sit on the bench against the glass railing. She had several bags and when she put them down one of them tipped over. A can of spray snow rolled out and tapped my shoe. I reached down to pick it up and hand it to her. I said I remembered the days of real snow in Dawson Creek, where the drifts were sometimes higher than the door of your house.

She said she was a former farm girl and recalled similar days of real snow, that she’d come to the Lower Mainland to retire.

I think that’s when I went into my rant about what Christmas was like when I was a kid. Filled with play and not presents.

I said, “Christmas was taking my toboggan out to my favourite hill at the back of the Royal Canadian Legion in the small village of Pouce Coupe, B.C., where we would slide until it was dark. The bonfire we built at the bottom made the slide even better. I would stay there until my jeans froze overtop of my long underwear. We’d take turns pulling each other home, lying back on the toboggan staring at the star-filled skies through the zipped-up hoods of our jackets, looking for Santa Claus.”

The woman got up and said “That sounds about right” in a futile attempt to placate me before she walked away. I leaned over the railing again, looking down at the castle.

An old man next to me said, “You’re from D.C. area?”

I said, “Oh, yes. Spent many years in Dawson Creek before our family moved to Pouce Coupe.”

He shook his head. “I used to live in Dawson Creek as well.”

His brown hair was short and parted on the side, which suited his round hairless white face. He was slightly overweight but not overly so, a dad-bod some people would call it nowadays.

He wore a grey, waist-length Columbia jacket with a blue-collared shirt under it, blue jeans and brown Docker shoes.

He wore a little too much aftershave and was shorter than I was. Most people are. Back then I stood six feet five inches and weighed 190 pounds.

His smile was open and friendly, and he had a good solid handshake. The kind of handshake where you knew it was a practised gesture.

I replied, “Really? Whereabouts did you live?”

He said that it was a hole in the wall on top of the hill.

I said, “Oh boy, yes, I am familiar with those places. We used to live there as well.”

Then he leaned in even closer, studying me. And I studied him.

He raised his arm slightly, finger pointing at my chest.

“Do you know a woman named Mary?”

“Mary? That’s my mother’s name.”

From Edmonton to the orphanage

Mary rarely said, “I love you.”

She was a tough woman who was silent most of the time. The exception was when she was telling you to do something or yelling at you for perceived wrongdoing.

In those circumstances, she would mix English with Cree, her first language. She always finished with “... just you never mind!”

If I persisted in wrongdoing, the next step for her was the belt, strap, spoon, extension cord, broom — whatever she could grab to hit me with.

She was not very motherly. We cooked for ourselves most of the time with whatever was in the cupboards or refrigerator, which was never much. My mother was prone to wandering off for days, even weeks at a time. She did have the common sense never to drink at home for fear “the welfare” would take us again.

The first time that happened we were still living in Edmonton. My aunts were caring for us at the time, but they were in their early 20s. They had a large and loud party the previous night with people coming into and out of the house, smashing bottles and spinning tires out front.

My siblings and I cowered in one room the whole night, hearing the loud voices, the arguing, the fistfights on the lawn. Sometimes people would open the bedroom door, looking for a private place. We huddled together, trying to make our infant brother stop crying from hunger.

The next morning, we woke up to silence and walked downstairs to see the house trashed with bottles and glass everywhere. Crushed cigarettes on the carpet and the smell of beer in the air. The curtains were closed, which made the living room dark, but the sun still peeked through in the dining room and kitchen.

My older brother, who was nine, casually went to the stove and started boiling a pot of water for porridge. My aunts got up and tripped over a couple of men asleep on the floor in the living room. They heard a car pull up in front of the house and cracked the curtains to see a four-door red car with the ministry logo on the door. They scrambled around the house waking up the sleeping men, who ran out the back just as we heard three knocks at the door.

Before I could understand the situation, I was stepping from that red car into the cool autumn morning and gazing at an orphanage draped in its cold white concrete, not unlike the Guildford mall.

The many windows with bars seemed to glare down at me like I wasn’t invited, but the large metal door swung open all too easily. I walked inside, then stopped and shuffled at the entrance in the shoes I shared with my brother. We were barely a year apart in age and so we shared everything. He had nothing else to wear so he was in his bare feet.

I smelled medicine and cleaning fluid. A nun came towards us. She had on a long grey dress and black bib that covered her large head and framed her stern face. “Six more you bring?” she asked in a French accent.

The man in the trench coat and glasses read from a notebook. “Yes, Native Indian, ages infant to nine years old.”

“And how old are you, young man?” She leaned over me, smiling. It was a smile I had come to expect from white faces. The judgment in that smile was as thick as a piece of bannock and just as salty.

I furrowed my brows and looked down at my feet. I held up five fingers.

“OK then, follow me,” she instructed.

We were all separated by age and gender. My younger brother did not have dark skin like I did. He had dirty blond hair. He was marched off to be with the white children in the orphanage. Suddenly I was alone, but I was calm.

As a child (and even now as an adult) I was very aware of all the parts of reality that were better. Like a kid with an ice cream cone, or a family in the park, or a kid on a bike. I wished it was me.

So when I was being told to leave a store when others were allowed in, or being searched as I left a store while others walked by and stared, I could always recall what was normal and compare it to what we were as a family, and to myself as an individual.

I noticed people who didn’t get thrown out of stores: how they acted, how they dressed. The analysis, in my young mind, came through a self-aware lens of shame, humility and inadequacy, because I was not that. I was embarrassed to be me.

But when I was with my family, I wasn’t the only one suffering that way. Up until that moment, my brothers, sisters and I were inseparable. We fought and argued, to be sure, but we were never lonely so long as we had each other. They were more than just siblings, they were my friends, best friends.

But here we were, separated. I had no idea it was for adoption purposes. All I knew was that I was by myself, and I felt dead inside. Nothing had any meaning anymore. I had no idea where our mother was, and perhaps I didn’t care. I do not recall experiencing any sense of desperation; I do recall having night terrors and sleepwalking. Perhaps that was a result of my denial.

One afternoon, slipping into a locked area to visit my infant brother in a crib, I noticed that he wasn’t crying. Why wasn’t he crying?

The months carried on. Very slowly, I adjusted to this new reality. I noticed decorations began to appear around the building. No one ever spoke of it but I knew what was going on.

Before we were taken, I had learned about Santa Claus by watching CBC television. Children received presents from him so long as you wrote him a letter. I asked my sister to help me write but there was no paper and nothing to write with. It seems silly looking back, but I got my sister to scratch our address with a fork on a piece of wood trim I found in a cupboard and threw it out the door into the snow.

If Santa was magic, he would find it, but I feared Santa would not know where I was. Could he even come here?

In the orphanage there were many pieces of religious iconography around: crosses, pictures of Jesus on the walls and Bibles. There were also decorations like wreaths, a tree and some garland around the office area but not in the hallways.

Would Santa visit this sterile and spartan place? I guess I did hold a sliver of hope, but it was fading with each passing day. No one spoke of Christmas and, after that first day, the nuns never spoke to me at all.

The days in that place seemed to blend together into one long day. I was waiting for something to happen, anything. I felt powerless and got lost inside my head wondering what was coming next. I felt like a caged animal that once had endless prairie to explore.

I had a depression like none other, a boredom that rivalled the longest rainy day. I would sit on the edge of the bed, head hung low, sometimes crying, staring at my feet.

I would wish that Santa Claus, if he was magical, would come and get me. It was the single hope that I hung on to.

Then the long day ended. The nun dressed in grey arrived at the doorway of the ward. She said, “Put your shoes on, you have to go now.”

I froze in fear, my hands playing with fingers at my chest. My lips quivered. “Where?”

The nun grabbed my hair and pulled me toward the door. She pushed me down the hall, the sound of her shoes echoing behind me. I stumbled. Where was I going? The big metal door opened, and I was pushed through, with no fanfare or words spoken. It slammed behind me.

My eyes widened to see my brothers and sisters running toward my mom, who stood by a car parked in front.

I was delighted to see her but at the same time ambivalent. I actually recall running partway, then walking the rest. My feet were frozen by the time I got in the car.

Once more, I piled into a car, my face pressed firmly against the window, going to another unknown place. That’d be Dawson Creek.

I should say we ended up there because the money and the gas ran out. And we stayed.

It became home for the remainder of my formative years. It was a place where the haves and the have-nots mixed uncomfortably, and again, judgment was everywhere. It was a place where white privilege was business as usual.

A new beginning

We moved into one of the single-room duplexes built by American soldiers when they constructed the Alaska Highway. They were remnants left over from a different era with no heater, just a pot-belly stove in the corner, and no insulation. There were no beds, no couches, no furniture of any kind.

My mother had left everything meaningful behind in Edmonton. She was never burdened by such nostalgic things. We eventually did get a kitchen table but only three chairs. I had to stand at the table to eat.

That season, I felt that special kind of cold you find in northern British Columbia, where your breath will freeze in the open air and ice will form an inch thick on a plastic-wrapped window. I met our poverty with my strange form of silent acceptance.

I spent hours poring over a torn and dog-eared Sears catalogue, one of my few means of entertainment. The cover said it all: The Christmas Wish Book.

Still unable to write a letter, I asked my mom instead to show Santa the pictures of the presents I wanted him to bring me.

“Get that away!” my mom yelled.

She swiped the book to the floor. I dove for it and picked it up in a protective way, staring back at her, expecting the stick. I uncreased the battered, still precious, pages. They were more than just pictures in a book to me.

I never showed her the catalogue again.

A neighbour at the door

Christmas Eve came and there was no tree. The house was void of seasonal trappings. There were no signs of Christmas here at all. Then came three knocks on the door, just like the knocks I heard when we were taken.

Why was it always three knocks?

My head snapped toward the door, and I felt the electricity of that last rap.

My mom opened it slowly. There stood a man with a freshly cut pine tree.

“Ho, ho, ho,” he said. The paper-thin walls of the duplex we lived in had let our neighbour in on the sounds of our near-relentless sobbing. But he had also heard all our hopes and dreams.

I could smell the pine from across the room as he brought the tree through the door. I spent the rest of the day helping set that tree up.

The Christmas decorations consisted of popcorn on thread, egg-carton creations and newspaper snowflakes. It wasn’t much to look at really, but it was ours and I was proud of the hours we spent.

There was one small string of lights strategically placed so that it lit up the room. I slept under that tree staring at them all night, getting lost in dreams.

When I woke a few hours later, in the early morning, there was an absence of presents under the tree. I tried not to cry. It didn’t work.

I sat cross-legged in the corner with my head in my hands, tears streaming, staring at my dirt-stained feet, the weight of everything slowly crushing me. But I made no sound. Mom always said, “Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.”

Then another three taps. I held my breath. Again, Mom answered the door. The man held black garbage bags brimming with carefully wrapped items.

He said, “I think Santa delivered these to the wrong house.” Those paper-thin walls had inspired this man to spend what little money he had on six almost-orphans so they could have a Christmas to remember, my first Christmas.

The toys were previously loved items. The broken pieces and missing wheels didn’t matter. I got to open something. There was a set of Matchbox cars and six pieces of orange racing track. There was a cowboy holster and six-guns.

I couldn’t think of a time I’d ever been happier. In fact, until that moment, there were only two things in the world that made me happy: ice cream and the Montreal Canadiens. I knew every player and watched most games when a television was available.

I opened my final gift and grinned from ear to ear. A pair of skates.

I didn’t know how to skate, but I was elated to have a pair of my own. With those skates, I could learn to fly like my hero Savard or tend goal like Dryden. The leather was a bit scarred, but the blades were sharp. There were letters stencilled on the inside: “N-E-I-L.”

It spelled a word I had never heard before. I asked the man what it meant.

He said, “These are genuine Neil skates. No one else in the world has these skates. These are very special.”

That evening, there was no Christmas dinner, no dinner at all, just some saltines with cheese and a glass of milk. Again, I slept on the wooden floor under the tree, skates in hand, using my jacket for a pillow.

That first winter in Dawson Creek, they were far too big for me. To fit into them, I stuffed wool socks in the front. I never learned to float on the ice like Savard, but I did learn to skate.

For many years, I used those skates, and my understanding of the significance of that day increased as I grew older. I cherished them.

The gift that endured

Many Christmases would pass in Dawson Creek and later in Pouce Coupe.

There were torturous events. I have memories of my siblings and me comparing battle scars in our rooms. We would ask each other, “What did you do?” And the answer would be, “There was no more cold tea” or “I left a spoon in the sink.”

When those disclosures were over, then came the revealing of the welts that an extension cord could make on a child’s back. There were empty bowls and hardships.

I watched two white boys beat up a kid near the entrance of the high school. They washed that kid’s face with new-fallen snow and said, “There, now you’re white!”

The words echoed and bounced around in my head. Fear froze me in place. I pulled my jacket down to hide my brown skin. Other kids walked past the boy lying on the ground, covered in snow.

“Don’t look at him,” I thought to myself.

This was when I knew I was a First Nations person capable of denying my proud heritage in order to survive. There was shame in that thought, soul-crushing shame that I did not help my brother off the ground.

Can I say, despite all that I’m telling you here, it wasn’t all bad? That it seems that way because maybe the bad is what I remember the most? At the time, I had a coping skill. I pictured bad moments on a giant blackboard and erased them with broad strokes of a brush.

They say that a bad parent was once a traumatized child, caught in their own chaotic intensity and suffering. The poetry of their soul is lost in so many crosswinds. I believe that to be true.

But I would sense a bigger picture. There is an untravelled, tumultuous sea to forgiveness and perhaps the challenge was to somehow keep your spirit intact while you found a way to sail across it.

My self-awareness caught a glimpse of the blackboard and told me that this was not how it should be. Somewhere along the journey, I would find my path, learn to heal, learn to love, and be the person I would approve of.

Maybe I could become the antithesis of the way I was raised and start a new circle, one that could spring new growth in the rotted remnants of a childhood.

I made myself one promise: to never be hungry again.

These ideas grew firm and stayed with me. They made me work hard to get far from the limited existence I was guaranteed in northern British Columbia.

With $300 in my jeans and a heart filled with courage, I was determined to start anew in Vancouver. When I first arrived, I was met by the same old familiar starvation. I even ate crabapples from trees to feed myself.

I held on for better days and I never let one Christmas pass without telling someone — a neighbour, a new friend, a girlfriend — about the man next door. I would show them my skates.

Meeting each other again

The old man in the mall dropped his hands to his side. He took one step closer. He said, “Do you remember one Christmas...”

His voice cracked and I didn’t let him finish.

“You... it was you.” I pointed back at him. “You were the man next door.”

He nodded, his eyes glazed.

I told him, “I tell the story of that Christmas every year to whoever will listen to it.” I continued, “What you did, it changed my life.”

I stood there in disbelief. Twenty years and many miles separated then and now. Yet in this small corner of the world, in a mall in Surrey, there we were. I wondered, “Why here and why now?”

He told me that back in those days he had been working on the oil rigs and had been laid off. Those days of no work turned into weeks and, soon enough, he had fallen into poverty he thought would never end. He said, “I knew Dawson Creek wasn’t the place for me if I wanted to change.”

He said that, after that Christmas Day, opportunity opened the door for him to transform. He didn’t say how. We just veered into some small talk about the who, what and wheres. When we were done, I said, “You know, all these years I never knew your name.”

“Neil,” he said, holding out his hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you again.”

I must have been stunned because, when he invited me to his home for a Christmas dinner, I actually accepted.

Socializing was uncomfortable for me. I had to excuse myself. I left that centre court and focused on my job. I can’t tell you the steps, the ways or the means, of the rest of that shift. I was lost in the magnitude of the moment. I was floating, trapped in a daydream, asking myself, “How could this be?”

Everything that happened to me, from that childhood Christmas morning to meeting him now, all the things in between. I felt the eradication of doubt, fear and anxiety. It was being replaced by confidence, courage and purpose. It was as real as the security keys I held in my hand. Afterward, I took step by ever-astonished step.

It still seems supernatural. The strong winds of revelation still scatter my thoughts in every direction.

The next evening I had Christmas Eve dinner with a family I had never met.

I stepped out of my car and into the drizzle. The rain fell like a soft whisper as I opened my umbrella. I hesitated for a moment before knocking three times. I almost shut my eyes. I was anxious and my thoughts raced.

Neil’s son answered the door. Neil introduced me and led me around the corner into his palatial home. The stairs spiralled upward to what seemed forever. The large chandelier in the entrance cast dancing sparkles of light around the room. I removed my shoes and walked slowly onto the white marble floor.

“Come on in, would you like some rum and eggnog?” he said.

His family had gathered in the kitchen. They all stared intently at me with that familiar smile on their faces. We stood around the type of large island I had only seen in magazines. It was adorned with acorns and candle creations, and a spread of food such as I had never encountered.

I said to Neil, “I brought you something, a gift.”

He said, “You really didn’t have to do that.”

I said, “This time I believe I do.”

They all looked a bit confused as he unwrapped the paper. He stood silent as he held his old Bauer skates in his hands for the first time in 20 years.

I told him, as his eyes glazed once more, that these skates meant more to me than he could ever possibly fathom. My hands began to shake, and I swallowed hard. I bowed my head and shut my eyes as I cleaned the blackboard just one more time.

I regaled them with the tale of how his skates guided me not only down the ice but through my life. The lessons I had learned and unlearned. The experiences and sentiments I carried with me everywhere now. The feeling that I was chosen to receive the most important of messages.

I told them that feeling made up the infrastructure of my spirit, my First Nations identity. I had found my path and travelled that road, crossed that sea. Poetry still painted the pictures of my soul. The same way that I honoured and accepted my mom for her struggles through residential school and finding her own healing journey.

And now I’m telling you. My siblings all found their own path and they travelled it well. This is what sustains me.

Those lessons — that gift — gave me strength for the next 30 years. My children now are the best part of me, courageous and independent. The best Christmas gift ever helped me realize that acceptance of the people in your circle guarantees you the freedom to love.

I am unwrapped a little bit each year — my memories, my experiences, the essence of who I am.

These are the skates that I give to you.

---

Excerpted from ‘Upon a Midnight Clear,’ edited by JJ Lee. Copyright 2024 JJ Lee. Published by Tidewater Press. Excerpted by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.

Happy holidays, readers. Our comment threads will be closed until Jan. 2 to give our moderators a much-deserved break. See you in 2025!