With a little help for our friends...

Mario Russell (on the right) catches his breath.

It takes a lot of heart to turn out on a Saturday morning after a week of rain storms to move a forest of Christmas trees onto a beach.  Nobody seemed to mind the weather, not our burly brothers from the Knights of Columbus, or the First West Vancouver Scouts, or the merry band of students from St. Thomas Aquinas Secondary School, or the dauntless Kennedys.  As soon as Mario Russell pulled in with his trailer of trees -- a Christmas on wheels from his Valley View Tree Farm -- we set to work fitting them into the holes prepped by Great Canadian Landscaping and Sequoia.  (Earlier in the week, one of the landscapers pulled a golden Christmas angel out of a hole she was digging.  Watch for it to take its place of glory on the landscapers' tree.)  In an hour or so the trees were planted, and Dundarave Beach began to look a lot like Christmas.

Every year at this time, when the trees go into the ground, you get this sense that all will be well.  Despite the serious challenges life can throw at all of us, when you've got a circle of friends standing together to face all of it with hope, it becomes clearer that a Christmas miracle is the most natural thing in the world.

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