225 50 Av, Lachine, Québec, H8T2T7, Canada. 514-634-2651
Bienvenue! / Welcome!
Summerlea's Christmas Crêche
Rev. George MacDonald's theme for the first Sunday in Advent was anonymous giving. After the
service, Tom Pavlasek related the following story of how the crêche that appears at
the front of the church each Christmas season came to be.In 1989, Tom and Lois were visiting their daughter in Nanaimo when the local radio station announced that 14 students had been massacred at McGill (in fact it was at Polytechnique, but little did they know). Being a professor at McGill, Tom and Lois decided to head for home. However, during the conversations it had come up that Summerlea did not have a Christmas crêche. Thinking to rectify this situation, Tom went out and bought some cedar shakes (shingles) which he carried back to Montreal in the aircraft. At home, with McGill not directly involved in the massacre, Tom created a crêche using the cedar shakes. Then the question arose as to how to create the figures that would be the central part of the crêche. While pondering this requirement, one day someone rummaging in a storage cupboard in the nursery came across a cardboard box containing a number of figures that turned out to be just the ticket for the crêche. No one, however, had any idea where the figures had come from or to whom they belonged. Finally it was decided to make use of the figures to depict the Christmas story in the crêche, where they reside to this day. And to this day, no one knows where those figures came from. |