These are the years when our world feels dimmer. Yet across Mississauga, Brampton, Scarborough, and neighbourhoods throughout our GTA, Christmas lights are being lit again, small constellations of hope dotting unsettled horizons. Their glow reminds us that illumination is not only ornamental but guidance, especially in our time marked by turbulence and darkness. These lights offer a quiet instruction: hold steady, draw close, and let hope do its essential work.

The year 2025 continued on a now-familiar and fatiguing pattern of uncertainty. Climate change pressed harder on vulnerable regions, and was notable in Hurricane Melissa’s traumatic impact on Jamaica. Significant and simultaneous episodes of warfare continued across the globe, bringing horrific and destabilising consequences for nations and populations already gravely impacted.

Our Caribbean, too, has felt the shearing winds. Rising anxieties over emerging militarisation in the region have revived colonial fears of power, provocation, and possession. Caricom nations are warning that peace, tourism, and trade that sustain our homelands are at risk.

Globally, the crises that shadowed last Christmas are still with us. The Israel-Hamas war persists; Russia’s assault on Ukraine now enters its fifth year. Each conflict represents different shades of darkness: political, moral, and spiritual, reminding us the age of reason still falters before the primal impulses of conquest, extraction, and revenge.

Into this atmosphere comes our cherished Christmas season with its message of renewal, resilience, goodwill, and shared humanity.

For our Caribbean diaspora in Canada, Christmas is the season that anchors memory and belonging, a time when we welcome family indoors from the wintry cold to gather in our homes fragrant with tradition and good cooking. This season affirms who we are as a community, not in spite of difficulty, but because difficulty shaped our path.

Yet as we prepare for celebration, we must acknowledge the broader darkness that also enters through our front doors; that the external turbulences are mirrored by our interior ones: envy, anger, apathy, injustice. But Christmas asks us to illuminate both realms with its healing light.

The lights we turn on in our windows and trees are also reminders, not decorations. They light the path toward kindness, generosity, and reconciliation; toward restoring balance in a world that is increasingly pulled toward rifts and fracture. They remind us that compassion is a deliberate offering, and should not be just a seasonal flourish.

Some may dismiss these virtues as gentle sentiment, soft in a world dominated by hard power, acquisition, and appropriation. But history teaches us that moral imagination often lights the path toward meaningful change; that empires throughout time have also fallen through the awakening illumination of conscience, in the persistent belief that leaders can choose compassion and generosity, rather than war, domination, despair, and extraction.

For our community here in the GTA, Christmas remains an invitation to reflect on how its messages of hope and religious faith have carried our generations through uncertainty; today, these messages still offer clarity and a way forward. When its light is cast at our feet, it reveals pathways for community building, bridging divides, and extending a steady hand toward those navigating darkness.

In the coming festive season, and in the New Year, these virtues are not optional; they are essential. As conflicts burn in pockets of the world, and climate pressures intensify hardship in our homelands, sincerity and hope survive as resilient seeds germinating within the detritus of despair. Christmas reminds us that even small gestures of goodwill can steady a neighbour, strengthen a family, or repair fragile communal bonds.

Celebrating Christmas does not mean we turn away from the world’s heaviness; instead, we confront it with a radiance that refuses to diminish. It is to look past the noise of warfare and the cold reach of geopolitics toward those small constellations of lights in our homes that have always guided us with hope, faith, and an unwavering commitment to a more peaceful world.