Pamela McColl

Pamela McColl is a Canadian publishing entrepreneur and advocate of children's issues and smoking cessation best known for releasing a smoke-free version of the classic Twas The Night Before Christmas.

Her career includes experience in publishing, as a health care worker with Canadian Mental Health and as a maternity labour support doula. Her early career was spent the field of costume design for film and theatre and she attended the National Theatre School in Montreal, Quebec and worked at the Stratford Festival in Ontario and the CBC. The Vancouver resident earned a BA in History/Sociology as she attended Queen’s University, the University of Manitoba, and did postgraduate work in Theatre History at the University of Victoria. She returned to study as a mature student in the faculty of Women’s Studies at the University of British Columbia and holds certification in Peer Counselling.

Her company Grafton and Scratch Publishing has published Baby and Me Tobacco Free, which she co-authored with Laurie Adams, and is the publisher of Twas The Night Before Christmas. She has a special interest in maternity and smoking cessation. She used to be a labour support doula and prenatal yoga instructor, and produced a video production of yoga in water entitled "Yoquatics". She has been published in the Birth Institute journal on the smoking cessation and the use of marijuana in pregnancy. She is a director on the advisory council of the national not-for-profit corporation Smart Approaches to Marijuana Canada. In 2015, she compiled the book On Marijuana – a powerful examination of what marijuana use means for our children, our communities and our future, a collection of essays and articles from those that oppose increasing the availability of and access to cannabis.

She is the publisher of seven books, including Pacific Spirit: The Forest Reborn, which United States Senator Frank Murkowski, the chair of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, labelled as “one of the most important works on forest management” in recent years.

Her new version of The Night before Christmas attracted attention from news outlets in several countries, including The New York Post, Huffington Post, CBC Radio, The Scotsman, and The Telegraph,. Stephen Colbert talked about it on his show, commenting "Santa can't quit smoking, he needs that vice". The book won several awards including three Benjamin Franklin Book Awards from the Independent Book Publisher’s Association, and a Moonbeam Children’s Book Award.