Christmas in Mariposa

Book excerpt: Longlisted for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour A funny and heart-warming tribute to Canada’s most famous small town, and its most celebrated humourist, Stephen Leacock. Many Canadians grew up in small towns, or at least in neighbourhoods that acted like small towns. But what if you grew up in Canada’s most famous small town—Stephen Leacock’s Mariposa? This was the world that journalist Jamie Lamb was raised in, the actual place that inspired Leacock’s Canadian classic, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town,over a century ago. The Mariposa of Lamb’s time was slightly different, yet it still embodied the heart and soul, the eccentricities and the bizarre local customs of Leacock’s sketches. Christmas in Mariposa is a celebration of that town and its people. It tells of secret gardens, special rinks, oddball hotels, remarkable foods, fast boats and sunken aircraft, Christmas Eve fireworks, and the best Christmas office party in the country. It describes a place where Christmas could be celebrated in summer with a Baby Jesus look-alike contest, Canada’s only officially sanctioned reindeer races, and the Three Wise Men arriving with gifts by parachute. It transports readers to a world where where Gordie Howe once dropped by for a skate, and Glenn Gould regularly came to eat a well-done steak and six Parker House rolls slathered in butter at a Chinese restaurant. Jamie Lamb’s Mariposa is timeless and quintessentially Canadian.