When asked by me some years ago why our nutty nuclear family always celebrated Christmas, my mother gave the usual explanation for her and my late dad’s often bizarre parenting decisions: “Well dear, we did it for you,” meaning me and my two younger brothers Eric and Jonny.

The reason I call this bizarre is that both my parents are Jewish. My mother Ruth Schachter is a holocaust refugee whose oil tycoon father Aaron Nisse led the family’s escape from Riga, Latvia, when she was 16 years old in the fall of 1939. A year later, she, her sister Dita and my grandparents finally settled in Montreal after taking the trans-Siberian railway through Russia, crossing the Pacific on a Japanese liner, being sprung from jail in Seattle for not having the right papers and then living in New York for six months. Quite a story and more of it when I eventually write my memoir. Read more…