CHRISTMAS IN THE BIG IGLOO: TRUE TALES FROM THE CANADIAN ARCTIC. Edited and with an introduction by Kenn Harper. Yellow-knife, Outcrop, c1983. 55pp, cloth, $14.95, ISBN 0-919315-07-0. Distributed by Rain-coast Books. 112 East 3rd Ave., Vancouver, B.C., V5T 1C8. CIP Grades 9 and up Reviewed by Joan McGrath Volume 13 Number 5 1985 September Christmas first came to the Arctic with the European explorers, traders, and missionaries who wintered there, bringing with them as best they could, the most-loved of all Christian festivals. Here, in accounts dating as early as the winter of 1819-1920, and as recently as the 1970s, natives of gentler shores, and in the later years Inuit writers as well, describe their Christmases in the North. Some few accounts are grim and despairing, telling only of homesickness and privation, but most tell of good fellowship and doughty efforts to do honour to the day. Religious services, rest from labour, festive foods (some of them most unappealing to the uninitiated), little gifts to share, and carefully hoarded mail from home to be opened, mark the earlier celebrations. Nowadays, airborne mail delivery and constant communication with the outside world have altered the arctic way of life forever, but vestiges of the past remain, and are nowhere more evident than in seasonal celebrations. Above all, and forever, the unchanged realities of wintering in the North shape the lives of those who live there. These twenty brief passages evoke images of an unfamiliar world of cold and darkness, but also of friendship and open-hearted sharing. Most attractively presented. Will provide useful supplemental material to anyone studying northern life and customs. Joan McGrath, Toronto Board of Education, Toronto, Ont.