Brace yourself, we are about to experience a truly Northern phenomenon. It is called The Great Christmas Population Deflation.
It involves a significant percentage of the population who head south for the holidays.
In the 1980s, the federal government commissioned a study by the Royal Canadian biological department, to determine just where all these winter refugees were going and why. Forty-seven-point-two per cent of them went to spend the season with friends and relatives in their southern homelands. Thirty-nine percent were heading to truly tropical regions where they could lay semi-naked in the sun, to bake and get sunburns of epic proportions. It is called the red scarlet scourge. The rest went globetrotting to the farthest corners of the planet because they had collected so many air miles on their government jobs they could fly anywhere.
The results of this study were never publicly released but I did find a copy of the report in the dump marked classified and top secret.
Anyone travelling in Canada in the winter is taking their chance but, in the North, we have extremely low temperatures and the risk of windstorms, blizzards, whiteouts and delays that can last for days or even weeks. It’s a bit of a crap shoot, to see if you even make it out of town, let alone manage to make connecting flights.
One word of caution though, sleeping on the airport floor is not as fun as it sounds and besides being rather uncomfortable, it can be far from hygienic. For some reason, airports just aren’t designed for people’s comfort during the inevitable and seemingly endless delays. Why they don’t provide soft chairs or cots for people to snooze on has always baffled me.
I’m not sure what this mid-winter event should be called. Is it an exodus, evacuation, migration or just holiday travel. Most cultures have some sort of winter event that involves travel often for family get-togethers. In the USA it is Thanksgiving, in Canada Christmas, in China New Years. Luckily, they are spaced out a little, otherwise it would be massive worldwide chaos and confusion as opposed to country or continent chaos and confusion.
I remember years ago going into the old Miners Mess the day before Christmas and the town was basically shutting down mid-afternoon. As one old-timer mused, it was like the town was deflating. Lots of people started leaving, especially once the schools closed. Most were flying out, but a number were driving. Suddenly there were parking spaces at stores and downtown. There were noticeably fewer cars on the roads and people in the stores. I liked that analogy of the population deflating.
Someone commented that it was as if the entire GNWT and all of its employees suddenly all left. If you ever wanted to stage a government coup, that would be the time to do it because many of the politicians, civil servants, contract workers, just up and leave for two weeks. The GNWT even started Donny Days so their employees could get a two-week winter holiday. At first it was supposed to be unpaid leave and a way for the government to save money, but that didn’t last long, and it became another paid vacation for the government. Ah yes, the government works in mysterious ways.
Biologists really should study the effects of this migration because first there is the exodus and then in the New Year there is the return. This leads to the January blues as a lot of people come back sick and various illnesses spread across the North and all its communities. So, one might describe it as a mid-winter super spreader event.
What you call it all depends on how you view it. For those who stay in the North, the period between Christmas and New Year is usually nice and quiet. A peaceful mid-winter lull.