How One City Found the Christmas Spirit After Disaster

On Wednesday night, Dec. 5, 1917, with Canadians entering their fourth year of the Great War, schoolkids across Halifax went to bed dreaming of what they would find under the Christmas tree, just 20 days away. Teddy bears and Erector Sets were all stacked up at a new institution called the department store. If you couldn’t get to one, you could order almost anything you wanted from their great innovation, the catalogue.