Christmas Eve Service Ideas

The making of Jack Layton

The Hudson Yacht Club, founded in 1909, doesn’t look like a promising spot for a young left-winger to get his first real taste of rebellion. The sailboats bob at their moorings near a sandy beach on the shore of Lake of Two Mountains, formed by the widening of the Ottawa River before it empties into the St. Lawrence just west of Montreal. The clubhouse of cream-coloured stucco and cedar shingles looks like the kind of place that would have a cozy private bar, decorated with nautical pennants—and it does. Over the mantle of the stone fireplace, there’s even a framed portrait of the Queen.

Jack Layton pretty much lived at the club during the summers of his childhood and teenage years. His parents, after all, were pillars of Hudson’s well-heeled English-speaking community. They sailed an 18-foot lightning, but the club’s main appeal for Jack was its outdoor pool. He was a fast swimmer. In an old black and white snapshot of the club’s competitive team, he’s the wiry kid wearing a medal around his neck and the grin that would later become famous.

Behind that halcyon image, though, was a reality that began nagging Jack as a teenager in the mid-1960s. Hudson’s population of about 3,500 was perhaps three-quarters English at the time. But what about the rest—the less prosperous French-speaking families? They weren’t members of the club. Either they couldn’t afford the fee, or they didn’t know anyone who might invite them to join. With Quebec’s Quiet Revolution well under way, the club presented a glaring example of how the province’s linguistic divide tended to run along economic and social fault lines. Layton recalls growing uneasy about the fact that while he swam in the club’s first-rate pool, the French kids were cooling off in the polluted river.

When Layton became the club’s “junior commodore”—inevitable for a boy who always seemed to end up running things—he realized he might actually be able to do something to protest the inequity. And it could be fun. The club held weekly teen dances in the summer. Layton scoured its rule book. “Buried in the rules was that everybody can bring one guest, except the junior commodore, who can bring more than one. No limit was proscribed,” he says. Layton and his buddies invited the whole town. “So every kid who wasn’t a member, I signed in.” That meant a lot of low-income, francophone teenagers.

The night was, at least in his memory, “fabulous.” The kids who always hung out at the club mixed with those who were seeing it from the inside for the first time. A real band from Montreal, M.G. and the Escorts, played. The northern lights put on a show never before seen over Lake of Two Mountains.

REPOST: Christmas Eve service ideas | Chris From Canada

I know lots of you are looking for Christmas Eve service ideas right now. I know because the Google search stats for this post are going through the roof :) I thought I’d make it easy for lots of you and repost this, basically a detailed recap of our Christmas Eve service with links to some resource. Hopefully it’s helpful for you!

The original post – http://www.chrisfromcanada.com/worship/christmas-eve-service-breakdown/

Normally I do my best to give you some thoughts related to Sunday morning and a bit of a confessional of how things went. This week I want to do something a little different. I know that there are lots of you who are looking for very specific ideas at certain times of year – Christmas Eve, Good Friday, Easter Sunday, etc – so I thought that I would give you a breakdown of our Christmas Eve service with some explanation of every single element.

If you are looking for Christmas Eve service ideas, hopefully this is helpful for you!

We did two Christmas Eve services this year – both of them were identical in content, lasted about 60 minutes and were family-friendly. We tell people that kids are welcome to come but we have no childcare. Because we know that kids will be in our auditorium, we program the service a little bit different from Sunday morning – the whole service moves unannounced, there is more sitting/standing than normal, we don’t have any silent prayer, etc etc.

Having said all of that, here is what we DID do for Christmas Eve this year -

Theme We normally don’t go big on set design and staging at OBC , mostly because we are a multi-use facility and our Sunday morning worship happens in a gym. But for Christmas Eve we normally put up some decor, flowers, candles, etc etc. In terms of staging our band, we had two different setups. For the opening Christmas songs we had three singers out front and a band with piano, keys, bass and drums. For the middle section, I moved off piano and played guitar and we also brought two readers on stage for the scripture passages.

Service of visitors on Christmas Eve), remind them to turn off cell phones and then read the passage from Luke where the angel Gabriel comes to Mary and explains that the baby she will carry is from God – that he will be great, the Son of the Most High and that His kingdom will never end. Right from the beginning of the night we wanted to hit on our theme – “A King Is Born”. We then lit the centre candle, representing that Christ has come and is in our midst.