It was a cheap Christmas for Ingrid Pickering and her family this year. The gift they wanted most simply falls from the sky, free of charge. A white Christmas.
"Growing up in England, it is every child's dream," explains the professor of molecular environmental science and newcomer to Saskatchewan.
And coming from the California coast, her family's most recent home, a white Christmas was possible only on video.
She and her husband, Graham George, a professor of geological science, had never experienced it. Nor had their three children: eight-year-old Alistair, six-year-old Dominic and three-year-old Rebecca.
They are themselves a novelty, a young and educated family coming to a province that has stereotypically been seen in recent years as home to aging farmers and young aboriginals.
"Saskatchewan," novelist Sharon Butala wrote in a 1988 essay about her home province, "was only a holding area where one waited impatiently until one was old enough to leave in order to enter the excitement of the real world."
The provincial population, once more than a million, has dropped below that watermark in recent years. Some 20,000 people a year -- many of them young and recently educated -- were vanishing from the provincial rolls as Saskatchewan nears its 100th birthday, which it will begin marking Jan. 1.
The young still leave, but suddenly there are also young arriving.
For Ingrid Pickering and Graham George, "the excitement of the real world" is a Prairie city that suddenly finds itself in a "have" province with, for them, unlimited prospects for the future.
The couple came as a package deal. Both were offered prestigious Canada Research Chairs at the University of Saskatchewan and came to Saskatoon specifically to continue their research using the new $174-million synchrotron light source that has been built on the edge of the university campus.
The scientists have world reputations in the study of mercury and selenium poisoning, and Prof. Pickering is considered an international expert in the absorption of metals by certain plants -- in particular, locoweed.
Their friends and colleagues at Stanford University thought that perhaps it had been working with locoweed that had led the family to forsake sunny and warm California for snowy and cold Saskatoon.
A few understood. The two research scientists would be going to work with the most modern lightbeam in the world -- an extravagant tool absolutely essential to their work -- and the chairs they had been offered were considered academic promotions.
But others wondered if the George family was going to a place where there would be tundra and no trees. Prof. Pickering was even given, on departure, ripe California grapes by a friend who said, "I don't suppose you get much fresh fruit up there."
The incredulity of Californians was no surprise to Prof. Pickering.
"What we were not prepared for," she laughs, "was incredulity from people in Saskatoon. They would ask, 'Why in the world did you move here from California?' Luckily, we had a very simple answer: the synchrotron."
Even so, she was surprised by the response from those already living here. "I would have thought people in Saskatoon would understand perfectly why people would want to come here," she says.
It is not just the inexpensive housing, but the clear air after smoggy California and the stunning differences in traffic.
"People complain about traffic jams when there's five cars in a row," she says. "We went to see the National Ballet when it was here. It took us about 10 minutes to drive there and we were able to find parking right next to the theatre. In San Francisco, we would have had more opportunities to see performances like that, but it would be a major undertaking to go to it."
Dean Chapman, a professor of anatomy and cell biology who is one of the main forces behind the synchrotron, came to Saskatoon from Chicago and says it now takes him "10 to 15 minutes" to get to work each day as opposed to 1½ to 2½ hours back in the Windy City, depending on gridlock.
"I'm from Oklahoma," Prof. Chapman adds, "so I can connect with how people would feel that they are in the middle of nowhere and have nothing [in Saskatchewan] But I can see a sense of pride here, a sense of adventure."
The Canadian Light Source was opened in the fall with national fanfare, and local residents have been sold on the facility.
Taxi drivers were invited to tours, complete with coffee and doughnuts. Prof. Pickering set up free lectures in the central library, and had scientists explain their research to packed audiences.
At Stanford University, where she and her husband did similar work, there was almost no sense of the California synchrotron's existence. "Here," she says, "everyone knows about it -- even if they don't know exactly what it does."
(The synchrotron works as a giant microscope, using tiny beams of light, about the width of a human hair and millions of times brighter than the sun, to view matter at its atomic level.)
Selling the facility to the world beyond the city limits is the responsibility of Bill Thomlinson, executive director of the Canadian Light Source.
Mr. Thomlinson himself had no intention of coming to Saskatoon, figuring he would retire from working with the synchrotron in Grenoble, France. But after a couple of visits to Saskatoon, the Buffalo native came to the conclusion that he had one more challenge left in his career.
"I was absolutely charmed by the people," he says. "I like this city. It's open, friendly, bright. There's so much enthusiasm here, so much warmth from the people. There's a quality of life here that's special."
Some of the lure for American academics, however, goes far beyond the research facilities and the city. "Following [George W.]Bush's election," he says with a grin, "I've been getting a lot of calls."
"The light source is a magnet," says University of Saskatchewan president Peter MacKinnon. "Whether this is a reversal of a perceived brain drain, I don't know. But it is a brain gain."
It is also a gain in other ways, as Prof. Chapman arrived with a young teenage daughter who has taken to the city and the three California children of professors Pickering and George are rapidly becoming northerners.
"They adapted far quicker than their parents," says Prof. Pickering. "They love it here, especially the snow. They're learning to skate. They can sing O Canada."
Which is more than a great many who have been here their whole lives can say.
Tomorrow: The dark side