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This First Person article is the experience of Itrat Anwar, a newcomer from Bangladesh who now calls Steinbach, Man., his home. For more information about CBC’s First Person stories, please see this FAQ. You can read more First Person articles here.

This Christmas, we hold each other close, thankful for the life we’ve built here in Canada. It’s a season of warmth, joy and togetherness, a time for family. 

But for us, Christmas brings a deep sense of longing. This will be the fourth year we’ve spent it far from our parents, separated by thousands of kilometres.

We long for them to feel the warmth of their grandchildren’s embrace, not just through a screen, but in person. There’s still an empty seat at our table. 

We’re surrounded by friends who feel like family and we remind ourselves often: We are lucky. 

But even gratitude can’t silence some kinds of longing.

We laughed, we cried, we waved at the screen and pretended we were there.– Itrat Anwar

My wife, Halyna, lost her mother the same month the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, while she was pregnant. The grief, the fear, the constant air raid alarms — it was more than any heart should have to bear. 

After days filled with uncertainty and danger, she finally escaped the war with a harrowing train journey, desperately seeking safety. 

Halyna says those days were the most terrifying of her life, and she still has nightmares. She believes only those who’ve lived through it can truly understand the depth of that fear.

It was during this difficult time that Halyna met my parents for the first time in Bangladesh. Despite the heavy sorrow she was carrying, a bond quickly formed between them.

My mother welcomed her not just as a daughter-in-law, but as a daughter who had come home. The love and warmth they showed her helped soften the grief she had been holding onto.

For the first time since losing her own mother, Halyna began to feel a sense of family again, a feeling she had thought lost forever. 

When we moved to Canada, we carried with us a simple dream: that one day, we would bring our parents here too, and be together again as a family — but life had different plans.

Just as we were searching for ways to make that dream a reality, we were blindsided by news that would change everything: my mother was diagnosed with cancer.

For months, she endured chemotherapy, surgery and radiation. Now, she’s undergoing additional treatments and continues to fight.

Her strength has always been an inspiration to us, but watching her go through this from across the ocean has left us feeling helpless. Sometimes, we believe the only reason she’s fighting so hard, staying strong, is because she wants to see her grandchildren.

The distance has never felt heavier. 

Meanwhile, our children are growing quickly. Neither of them has met their grandparents in person, not once. Their relationship with them exists only through glowing screens and grainy video calls. 

Sometimes, they hug the screen and call them “My nanu,” (grandma), kissing it as if trying to bridge the kilometres between them. It’s a bittersweet moment — sweet in its innocence, yet heartbreaking in the realization of how far apart we are. 

Recently, my only brother got married. Even though we were so far away and it was midnight here, we watched the ceremony over a video call. We laughed, we cried, we waved at the screen and pretended we were there.

Life here in Canada is good, truly good. I work to support the family, while my wife cares for our little ones at home, eagerly waiting for the day when our parents can finally be here with us. She’s also ready to return to work, so we can better manage financially. 

Some days, though, are hard. The weight of rent, bills and car payments can feel overwhelming. Flying across the world to visit our parents isn’t something we can manage right now, and bringing them here still feels like a distant dream.

We worry about their safety in Bangladesh. The year 2024 was chaotic, and the political situation is growing more unstable. The upcoming national elections could bring even more violence.

The images from this time are unsettling, and if you saw them, they would scare you. I’ve grown up amid political unrest, and it has always been volatile. I was lucky to survive several close calls myself.

We dream. We hope. And we hold our parents close, across continents.– Itrat Anwar

This fear, this uncertainty, is something we carry with us every day. And though we are safe here in Canada, the ache of being far from our loved ones only grows stronger. We know we’re not alone in this. So many immigrant families carry the same quiet pain.

Still, we imagine the day when our children will finally run into their grandparents’ arms, not through a screen, but in a real embrace — one filled with warmth, tears and all the years we’ve been waiting for this. 

Next year, we’ll celebrate together. Maybe next year, those empty spaces at our table will finally be filled. And until then, we dream. We hope. And we hold our parents close, across continents, across screens, across every mile between us.

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The traditional market “Santa rally” — a seasonal phenomenon in which stocks often rally through November and December — has been conspicuous by its absence this year, as fears about massive spending on infrastructure by highly valued artificial intelligence companies have weighed on investors’ minds.

“December is often synonymous with buoyant equities,” wrote analysts at Bank of America. “But this year’s backdrop is anything but ordinary. From AI-driven volatility to shifting Fed expectations . . . investors are navigating a landscape where traditional year-end patterns could be challenged.”

On average, since 1928, the S&P 500 has risen 4 per cent between October 28 and New Year’s Eve, Deutsche Bank analysis showed. This year, both the S&P 500 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite are in negative territory in that period so far.

Earnings from Oracle and Broadcom, both of which fell short of analysts’ lofty expectations, were the catalysts for the most recent market wobbles. Oracle’s share price has fallen about 45 per cent from its September peak and, in a sign of contagion, Nvidia is down about 15 per cent since the start of November.

But despite the recent jitters, global equity markets have still logged double-digit gains this year.

Mislav Matejka, head of global and European equity strategy at JPMorgan, suggested that investors might “square positions and reduce directional risk into the end of the year” to lock in their 2025 gains. “You don’t have a tailwind in the very near term,” he suggested.

While a full reversal of recent losses may be off the cards, the final trading sessions of the year are unlikely to do damage to a very strong year for markets. Emily Herbert

How much did US growth slow in the third quarter?

Investors will get a final pre-Christmas reading on the health of the world’s largest economy this week, and Tuesday’s GDP data is expected to paint a buoyant picture despite growth slowing.

Economists polled by Reuters forecast that output expanded at an annualised rate of 3.2 per cent in the third quarter, easing from 3.8 per cent in the previous three months but comfortably ahead of the 2.3 per cent pace recorded a year earlier. If realised, the data would reinforce the view that the US economy continues to outperform its peers even as growth moderates.

The release has been delayed by the federal government shutdown earlier this year, which also caused the Bureau of Economic Analysis to scrap its customary advance estimate for the third quarter. Instead, it will publish a combined first and second estimate, heightening recent uncertainty about official data.

Much of the third quarter’s momentum is expected to have come from capital spending linked to the artificial intelligence boom, particularly investment in data centres and computing equipment. Matthew Martin, senior US economist at Oxford Economics, estimates that such investment has added roughly $60bn to real GDP over the past two years and said this week that “this is only likely to grow”. Investors will be keen to assess how concentrated that strength has been, and whether it reflects a broader uplift in business investment.

Household consumption will be another focal point. Consumer spending has remained resilient despite elevated interest rates and early signs of cooling in the labour market, providing a crucial buffer against slowing growth elsewhere. Investors will look closely at whether services spending continued to offset weakness in goods demand as households adjusted to tighter financial conditions.

Yet confidence in the data itself may be fragile. Restrictions placed on the Bureau of Labor Statistics during the government shutdown have already raised doubts about recent economic releases. Markets barely reacted to data this week showing a sharp slowdown in consumer price inflation, with investors discounting figures compiled amid gaps in survey collection — a scepticism that may also colour the reception of next week’s GDP report. Kate Duguid

Is Australia moving closer to a rate rise?

When the Reserve Bank of Australia decided earlier this month to leave its policy interest rate unchanged at 3.6 per cent, it also signalled a “more broadly based pick-up in inflation”, intensifying speculation that its next move would be to raise rates, after three cuts this year.

Traders are ascribing a roughly 25 per cent chance to the RBA’s first rise coming in February, according to levels implied by derivatives markets. The minutes of the December meeting, to be released on Tuesday, will be pored over by investors for anything that supports or contradicts that view.

Australia has been one example, along with Canada and others, where global rates traders have moved to call the end of the rate-cutting cycle, prompted by stubborn inflation and stronger than expected economic data.

RBA governor Michele Bullock said on the day of the December decision that the rate-setting board would “do what it thinks it needs to do” to get inflation back to the 2.5 per cent midpoint of its target range. Inflation was running at 3.8 per cent in October.

“We expect the minutes to contain information on what the board would need to see to produce a rate hike,” said analysts at Citi. The minutes will also be closely watched by rate-setters elsewhere, for whom Australia might be a sign of things to come. Ian Smith