Christine Blanchard, a volunteer with Ottawa's Toy Mountain campaign, is busy finding the right gift bag for families in need of cheer. The Salvation Army and CTV Ottawa run this donation drive every year, but recent rises in cost of living have left Ottawans more reliant on charity.Ashley Fraser/The Globe and Mail
Santa’s workshop is at the North Pole; everyone knows that. But what fewer people know is that it has an outpost in Ottawa’s downtown core.
It’s tucked into the guts of a nondescript commercial building, but inside, there are reindeer hoofprints on the floor and mini-lights twinkle from every available surface.
This is Toy Mountain, a non-profit run by The Salvation Army that aims to make sure each child has a toy to unwrap on Christmas morning; in Ottawa, where the program has been running since 1997, they bundle up presents for about 25,000 kids a year. The Salvation Army runs similar programs of different scales in almost all of the 400 Canadian communities where they work.
Ross Davies ferries gifts from floor to floor at Toy Mountain's space on Sparks Street. The donation drive gets its goods from local businesses, schools, community groups and members of the public.Ashley Fraser/The Globe and Mail
One afternoon two weeks before Christmas Eve, a handful of parents waited in a short line for their appointment to pick up toys. A man sat just inside the door feeding a bottle to a tiny, perfect little curlicue of newborn baby. A toddler from another family wandered around, charming bystanders while his mom spoke to a staff member. On busy days, Toy Mountain tries to see 50 families an hour, and they were staying open late that evening.
Parents or caregivers register by calling the 211 information line; to be eligible they must have children aged 12 and under and a family income below the low-income cut off, which this year is just shy of $55,000 for a family of four in Ottawa.
When parents arrive, a greeter ushers them into what everyone calls “the office,” though it deliberately looks and feels more like a visit with Santa than a social service agency: coloured lights, Christmas tablecloths, a lamp with a big red bow on it and a diffuser puffing a scent called Wintergreen into the air. Intake appointments are by necessity brief, but staff and volunteers tried to get a sense of what was going on with a family and connect them with other services, because a lack of funds for Christmas toys was probably a symptom of bigger stresses.
Staff keep a boy entertained as his family receive their toys.Ashley Fraser/The Globe and Mail
Parents left the office with a piece of paper that showed the gender and ages of their kids, following reindeer hoofprint decals on the floor to the toy distribution area. There, volunteers ducked behind a red velvet curtain to a loading dock where pink and blue plastic bags filled with toys were carefully divided by recipient category, then hustled back to hand them off to waiting parents.
One father said his family had arrived from Tunisia not long ago and he was still looking for work, so Toy Mountain was a big help with three kids to shop for.
Another mom said the cost of groceries had made things harder than usual this year, and she had extra challenges with two of her kids on the autism spectrum. Her four-year-old son loves anything vehicle-related, and his toy bag included a big remote-control crane; her daughter received several dolls and stuffies that would delight her.
A young woman with a perfectly scowly blonde toddler said she and her two kids had to leave home two months ago, so they were on their own this time of year. Her face and voice were upbeat, but her last few words crumpled.
A white board keeps a rolling tally of the toys collected from across Ottawa.Ashley Fraser/The Globe and Mail
Christmas, we are told, is about abundance. Gleaming piles of food and gifts, sparkly gatherings and rosy company, toys and trees and baubles galore. Even the nonmaterial side of the holidays is supposed to be about plenty: joy and generosity, coziness and peace all bubbling over by candlelight.
But we’ve also spent the entire year – and the year before this one, too – talking about how the high cost of living is making people feel relentlessly stressed. The price of housing, groceries and utilities is pushing those on the vulnerable edge of our society and economy into the abyss, and nudging many who dwell around the middle a few notches further away from security and optimism.
There have always been those who slipped through the cracks, but the economic fissures are wider now, and more people are tumbling into them.
Christmas in the midst of an affordability crisis is about worry, frustration, improvisation and forcibly adjusted expectations – and it’s also about the helpers who are trying to lighten the load a bit, or at least make sure people who are struggling know someone sees them.
It’s obvious how much care has gone into making the Toy Mountain space as cheerful as possible, how much warmth and there-but-for-the-grace-of-God humanity the staff and volunteers bring to the job. And yet you can imagine that for many parents, this is a truly wonderful thing no one ever wanted to need.
“Day after day after day, I’m running into people who are saying, ‘I used to donate to The Salvation Army. I used to be able to drop off a toy at Toy Mountain, I used to take my kids to Walmart and do that shopping,’” said Glenn van Gulik, spokesperson for The Salvation Army in Ontario. “And now this year they’re going, ‘I can’t do that. We’re actually going to have to reach out for help this year.’”
Liza Navarro, Julie Liu and Perla Santos get a bite to eat at Malvern Family Resource Centre. When the Scarborough facility saw more and more seniors showing up hungry, it began to serve food at all its events.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
The holidays are about how we celebrate with food, too. And in Toronto earlier this year, something different was going on at the Malvern Family Resource Centre in Scarborough.
“We were noticing some really extreme numbers of folks coming to all of our programs hungry,” said executive director Josh Berman. “You can’t run early literacy programming or youth mental health workshops or seniors’ chair yoga if people just have such a foundational need for food.”
With the children, this was easy to spot because kids are blunt, so they would simply tell staff they were hungry or ask for more snacks.
With the grown-ups, they had to look more closely. In their seniors’ programming, they realized more people were coming to the activities that included food, no matter what the program was. Some people would ask to bring extras home for a family member – just because it was so tasty, they might say by way of explanation. Others would surreptitiously load up a plate or bag to take home.
And so the Malvern centre completely changed their programming, going from perhaps 20 per cent of their activities including a food component to every program they offer, which means providing 1,500 meals a week.
“It’s something that we weren’t planning for at the beginning of 2024, something that we’ve mostly kind of scraped together funding to do,” said Mr. Berman.
Suri Navaratnarajah and Ariyamalar Seevaratnam are taking a wood-burning class at the Malvern centre, which offers about 1,500 meals a week to the community.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
As he was speaking, last-minute preparations were under way for a can’t-miss event that evening: the Winter Wonderland seniors’ dinner and dance.
The evening is so popular that tickets always sell out, and Amy Semenuk, manager of community and family programs and services, said people who can will buy tickets for friends who might not be able to swing the $25 cost to cover food and a DJ. They get catering from a neighbourhood restaurant and volunteers act as servers.
After dinner, the seniors hit the dance floor and go non-stop – until precisely 9 p.m.
“They come in, they’re totally dressed up – like, this is a thing for some of them, full-out dresses, they get their hair done,” said Ms. Semenuk. “You know, we’re seeing more men at these programs, which we don’t often.”
The dance is the most celebratory version of it, but the centre’s new approach of including food in all its programming was meant to be more fair, she said, so that people didn’t have to pick and choose what they attend. It also lightens some of the stigma associated with need: the food is just there for everyone, so you might as well take some.
Mike MacDonald says donations are steady at the Upper Room Hospitality Ministry in Charlottetown, but demand is also on the rise.John Morris/The Globe And Mail
Out on the east coast, in Charlottetown, the Upper Room Hospitality Ministry hosts a soup kitchen that’s open seven days a week, and runs a food bank. At the moment, 37 per cent of their food bank visitors are employed but can’t make ends meet. They do a Christmas dinner at the soup kitchen and will give out upwards of 1,000 turkeys with festive extras, because they know that while food is a necessity, it’s also about joy.
While incoming donations have been steady, the demand for food has jumped. Executive director Mike MacDonald laments how that increased demand has stretched thin their ability to make human connections.
“We don’t have as much time as we did to have that personal conversation with somebody and get to know somebody. When you’re doubling your numbers, it’s pretty hard to give them the time,” he said. “We try to do as much as we can trying to make it not real transactional, but sometimes I feel that it’s going in that direction, and that’s a difficult one for me.”
Judy Mepsted is the manager of the two St. Vincent de Paul thrift stores in London, Ont., and she’s seen a big change in their clientele lately. The stores have become active on social media, so more people are finding them, including newcomers to Canada and others looking for economical options.
“A lot of the people that were donors are now shopping here,” she said. “Times are tough, and people are looking to save a dollar.”
St. Vincent de Paul is enormously proud of their vintage furniture – resellers and collectors flock to their unique offerings – and thrifting has found a new cachet with young adults, she said, so what started with an economic shove may have shifted people’s buying habits in a more durable way.
But that economic shove is not a small factor – in London, and across Canada.
Christopher Brayshaw says his patrons at Pulpfiction Books are looking more cash-conscious than usual.Jimmy Jeong/The Globe and Mail
“I’m broke, everyone I know is broke,” said Christopher Brayshaw, owner of Pulpfiction Books in Vancouver. “Even people who I would describe as relatively affluent are broke.”
Pulpfiction’s location on Main Street has been open for nearly 25 years. It’s got cracked linoleum floors, rickety handmade shelves crammed with new and used books that are always fighting the staff’s organizational efforts, and on warm days, the whole place smells of gently oxidizing paper.
It is, in short, a proper bookstore.
It’s clear to Mr. Brayshaw that people are looking to economize their holiday shopping; Pulpfiction offers a preorder discount on Canadian books soon to be published, and Mr. Brayshaw said customers have been gravitating toward those even if the books might not arrive by Christmas.
He’s also tried a discount for paying by cash or debit card, because of punishing credit card merchant fees. Some customers are thrilled to save a bit, while others insist on using a credit card for roundabout reasons.
“I can tell just from their defense of why it has to be credit,” he said. “And, I mean, I’m not out to shame anybody or to make anybody feel bad, but I certainly get the sense that some people are shopping while the cupboard is bare.”
But often, what Mr. Brayshaw senses in his customers right now is a need that is both deeper and more intangible than that.
“I think a lot of people got through COVID okay, and then discovered that they had large and difficult feelings, which I would liken to grief or mourning,” he said. “There are a lot of either very angry or very alienated or very deeply sad people wandering around in the world.”
They come into the store asking for a book, but he thinks it’s really connection they’re after.
Workers install a Christmas tree in Vancouver, one of the most expensive places to live in Canada.Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press
To Teresa Spinelli, president of The Italian Centre Shop, an Edmonton institution for 65 years, two things are readily apparent in people’s shopping carts at the moment.
On the one hand, cheese and meat are the first things that get scratched off the list when times are tight, and people get creative to stretch their budgets with economical staples. But on the other hand, people who have spent all year feeling squeezed will, if they can possibly manage it, find a way to treat themselves.
“I think that people that can’t indulge all year long are going to indulge this time of year,” she said.
The Italian Centre Shop prides itself on a huge stock of European products that cater to different immigrant communities in the neighbourhoods surrounding its four Edmonton stores and the one in Calgary. Food is sustenance, but food is also culture and memory and home, which Ms. Spinelli sees every time a new arrival from Ukraine steps into the store and sees that they carry Ukrainian cheese.
“They go crazy – not necessarily because Ukrainian cheese is really good, but because it reminds them at home,” she said.
Polish chocolate flies off the shelves, too. Ms. Spinelli loves chocolate, but she tried it – here she makes a noise like a fork in a garbage disposal – and was mystified by the appeal. So she started asking people why they buy it.
“All the stories were the same,” she said. “‘We were a poor family. This chocolate bar has eight bars, and our dad at Christmas would give us one bar each.’”
Sometimes the difference between something mediocre made necessary by deprivation and something wonderful and sentimental is the passage of time and the prism of our memory.
Whether Toy Mountain can give an Ottawa family five toys or just one, 'they will get something,' says Diana Javier, manager of community services for The Salvation Army.Ashley Fraser/The Globe and Mail
Back in Ottawa, trucks continue to pull up outside Toy Mountain bearing new donations gathered from malls, stores and workplaces around the city. Volunteers inspect and sort them onto long tables labelled by age and gender – toddler girls, boys aged 8-10 and so on – that look like hastily set-up toy stores, then bundle them up for their recipients.
Donations are plentiful in the three-to-four age range, but contributions are often sparser for babies and toddlers, and particularly for older kids.
They try for one small, one medium and one large toy for each child, along with a few stocking stuffers or a plush toy. But with toys coming in and going out on a constant basis and donations unpredictable, it’s a never-ending balancing act.
“We just want to make sure, even if it’s five toys or one toy, a family will come to our space, they will get something,” said Diana Javier, who oversees Toy Mountain in Ottawa as manager of community services for The Salvation Army. “So it’s just a matter of strategizing it.”
Asked how they do that when they have no idea if they’ll have enough, she smiles and offers a little squeak of agreement and a shrug: they just do.
Toy Mountain appointments will go until Dec. 23, but they know to expect some panicked phone calls from parents on Christmas Eve. Staff members all keep bags of toys in their cars so they can make sure everyone is covered, somehow.
Julie Bélisle explores a pile of stuffed toys to find the perfect one for a young girl.Ashley Fraser/The Globe and Mail
Often the difference between being a helper or a person in need of help isn’t about who you are, it’s about the moment you’re in.
The two volunteers handing out gifts at Toy Mountain that day two weeks before Christmas were friends and former co-workers who have been volunteering there together for the last few years. They stood on one side of a brightly-draped table, bathed in the particular warm glow that multicoloured Christmas lights cast, passing big bags of toys to parents on the other side of the table, one after another.
Carolynne Webb grasped carefully for her words as she explained that she had been fortunate in life – not wealthy, but never unsure where her next meal was coming from or unable to buy toys for her daughter – and it hurt her heart as a fellow parent to think about people making impossible choices.
“I’ve been so lucky to never be in the position where I’ve had to use these services,” she said. “So it’s really hard for me to know what it’s like for them.”
But Christine Blanchard knew.
“I lived it when I was a kid, my mom couldn’t afford,” she said. “So I know how it feels for them to be able to bring some joy to their children.”
Sometimes you end up on one side of a table trying to help because you know how lucky you are to have never been on the other side. Other times, you want to help because you know exactly what it feels like to need a hand.
Maybe a year in which many of us could feel the cracks widening under our feet will remind us of just how short the distance is between those two sides of the table, and let us see the people on the other side more clearly.
Editor’s note: (Dec. 23, 2024): A previous version of this article incorrectly referred to 211 as the city of Ottawa's information line. The program is run provincially and nationally.
Toy Mountain is accepting new appointments until Dec. 23 as volunteers like Ms. Blanchard find homes for the gifts in their bags.Ashley Fraser/The Globe and Mail