We found this one in the annals, and thought it fitting for the season. It was originally published in January of '87, and we have edited slightly for colour. Enjoy! O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us! – quote from To a Louse by Robert Burns Every once in a while, one gets a fleeting glimpse of oneself in the mirror of someone else’s words and it was so for me the other day. I was talking with someone in Saint John with whom I have done business for a number of years. When the business has concluded, we often move off into other universes of discourse and have a good chin-wag about anything under the sun that happens to interest us at the moment. Often the talk has to do with religion – he is a member of one church, I of another – but the other day the talk turned in the direction of the cold weather and heating systems. Another beautiful piece originally published on December 28th, 1993. Please enjoy, and we hope you have had a Merry Christmas.
It is cold and clear in the small town of Bethlehem, this night, in the days of Caesar Augustus. Cyrenius is governor of Syria, and we would find the road busy with people returning to their home town for the census. Bethlehem hums with the influx, and the only inn is jammed with travellers. The low-ceilinged rooms are hot and stuffy, and so we go back outside into the velvet dark, in which the stars sparkle like diamonds lit from behind. We believe this text originated from the following source.
One of the most popular of the medieval German mystery plays was the Paradise play, representing the creation of man, the sin of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from Paradise. This play became a favorite for Advent because it usually ended with the consoling promise of a Savior. As a matter of fact, the closing scenes led directly to the story of Bethlehem. In this play, the Garden of Eden was represented by a large tree symbolizing the "Tree of Discernment of Good and Evil." The Paradise tree was usually surrounded by lighted candles and the play enacted within the circle of lights. The Paradise tree gradually found its way into the homes of the people. The custom arose of setting it up once a year in honor of Adam and Eve on their feast, December 24. This particular feast, never celebrated in the Latin Church, was borrowed from the Eastern Rite. At this time the tree was bedecked with the symbolic apple, but further than that it bore no other resemblance to our present Christmas tree. But, at the same time, Christ was not forgotten. The Christmas candle in honor of Christ, the light of the world, was placed on top of a wooden pyramid, adorned with tinsel and colored glass balls. It was during the fifteenth century that more ornamentation began to appear on the tree. Since the Paradise tree already bore the fruit of Adam and Eve's sin, it was now thought proper to add a symbol of the "saving fruit" of the Blessed Sacrament. Accordingly, small white wafers were placed on its branches. Later, when imaginations began working overtime, shapes of men, birds, roosters, lions and other animals were also hung on the tree. But it was insisted that these latter had to be cut from brown dough; the wafers were made from white dough. People living in the sixteenth century finally began to notice the similarity between the tree and the Christmas pyramid. The tree was, so to say, a living pyramid and they might well combine the two — the tree and the lights. From then on, it became the Christmas tree. As time went on, the cookie forms disappeared and ornaments, made in symbolic shapes, took their place. By now, these have been replaced by meaningless decorated balls. However, even these need not lose their symbolism. The colored balls become more meaningful and more beautiful if religious pictures, symbolizing Christmas, are pasted or painted upon them. Your religious Christmas cards can supply you with ample pictures for this. The children will delight in attaching the pictures to the ornaments, or even making symbolic paper ornaments to hang on the tree. Lee originally wrote this piece after Christmas, however, we felt it was just right as a lead up to the big event. This column was initially published in the Kings County Record January 12, 1993.
Christmas, at least the commercial one, is over and gone and the stores are gearing up for the next major festival: Valentine’s Day. Last night being Twelfth Night, the end of the traditional twelve days of Christmas, we took the tree down and put away the ornaments, the strings of lights, the candleholders and the Stedman's angel I bought several years ago and get teased about, who graces (I think) the very top of the tree. Truth to tell, I always have a hard time taking down the tree. Something in me rebels against the dismantling of this gentle symbol of peace and hope. I know the time has come to take the tree down. That does not make the process any less of a hurdle, though. As we slip further and further away from summer, I feel this column (originally published on November 28, 2006) aptly describes our feelings on this cruel month. Enjoy...
As I write, the late-afternoon sunlight of a late November day is withdrawing across the valley before us and the sunlight lighting up the kitchen will, in a few moments, fade as its source disappears behind the long hill behind us. It was a treat to see the light today, even if the mercury in the thermometer never managed to climb more than a degree or so above the freezing mark and the air, at least when I was out for a walk around three o’clock, felt like it had had a close call with a lot of ice cubes. Well here we go, over the edge and down the slippery slope to the end of the year. The days, as the feller said, are drawing in. (What is the opposite of that expression, exactly? Nobody comes up to me in February, slaps me on the back and says, "Well, lad, the days are drawing out." In February all you get if you mention the time of year is a bleak look and the sort of noise in the throat that a hundred years ago would have been diagnosed as catarrh.)
There is no doubt that the weather has bleakened, this last little while. Even the tamaracks have divested themselves of color. The parsley up in the garden has gone from looking undaunted to looking dogged, and everything else - except, of course, the brussels sprouts - is but a memory. Speaking of brussels sprouts, I don't suppose you know off-hand what the Latin name for that plant is? No? Neither did I, until I tripped over it the other day. I've been brooding on it ever since. Any guesses? It's brassica oleracea gemmifera, and don't tell me you knew that all along. Why should a plant like the brussels sprout cause such an outpouring of botanical nomenclature is really beyond me. The radish, for example, gets two words (more than enough, if you ask me): raphanus sativa, which, being translated into the vulgar tongue signifieth, the radish that is sown - presumably in contrast to the radish that grows wild. I mean, nobody is likely to stay up late at night composing odes to raphanus sativa, when all that means is something like "the garden-variety radish." You would think the botanists would get carried away in flights of poetry over some plant like the rose, but no. A rose is "any plant of the genus rosa," and I don't have to tell you what that means. But really, the brussels sprout for poetry? All of that Latin means "the jewel-bearing member of the cabbage family that resembles a vegetable." Next time I meet a brussels sprout I'll be more respectful, that's for sure. Francois Villon, in a rather good poem about one (or more) old girl friends, asked the rhetorically effective question, "Where are the snows of yester-year?" It was effective because Francois lived in France. I don't care what the geographers tell me about Bordeaux, France, being practically as far north as Sussex - France does not have enough real winter weather to make the snows of yester-year anything more than something to threaten children with ("You kids pipe down in there or I'll dump the snows of yester-year on you"). As for this correspondent, I have no interest in locating the snows of yester-year or any other year - if you stumble on them don't call me collect. What I wouldn't mind asking is, Where are the tomatoes of yester-month? (Actually, it is the tomatoes of the month before yester-month that I miss, but a little poetic license never hurt anybody.) Do you remember tomatoes? Tomatoes right off the plant, with that slightly grainy surface and the amazing aroma? Tomatoes with their red glow that owes nothing to bromine, x-rays, or red dye no. 2? Tomatoes that taste like they were compounded of the earth and the sky and the slow wheel of the sun across the heavens? Where are they, eh? Now there's a question worth asking. Do we have to wait another ten months or so before the tomatoes and the basil have hit their stride? Weep, weep, for the dying of the light. Someone mentioned to me, as I was wringing my hands over the symptoms of tomato-withdrawal, that the tomato is a member of the deadly nightshade family. Well, we all have handicaps to overcome. I have worn glasses from the age of six, for example -and no doubt many distinguished citizens rose from what are euphemistically called humble beginnings. So don't bad-mouth the tomato just because some of its relatives have been known to hang around store fronts where the special for the week is a fresh shipment of henbane, and the eye of newt is on for 29 cents a dozen. I'll tell you one thing that is still going strong, though. Ornamental kale. Oh, wow.t. Autumn is upon us again, and with it comes the house fly. Enjoy this column originally published in the Record on September 27, 1988.
It's hard to believe that Autumn is upon us, already. The signs are unmistakable, though. The apple trees, with their burden of fruit, no longer have to be looked for in the woods; with their red and yellow and speckled crop, they stand out clearly. Some of maple trees around the country look as though they had low-grade fevers. Their green has given way to a flush of dull red. Seems to come earlier every year. Other signs appear as well now. Deer season will soon be upon us. We get the usual compliment of cars cruising past slowly, to see if there are any deer in the lower meadow. It's not the valleys of life I mind so much as the dips – like the dipstick who shot a young deer in our field twenty minutes or so before hunting season started last year, walked down to look at it, decided he wanted a bigger deer, and just left. We came across this column while perusing content for Lee's forthcoming book. We thought it was a timely addition to the blog given all of the hurricane trouble the Carolinas are now experiencing. This text was originally published twenty-five years ago in the Record on September 21st, 1993... Enjoy.
For the first time ever, I was looking forward to the hurricane season this year. Not, I hasten to add, because I was hoping to experience one but because I thought a hurricane might do us some good, as it seems to have done in fact. Only gradually are we beginning to recognize how intimately the elements of our earthly existence are tied together, how a small event here can cause a major event somewhere else, how the warmth of a part of the Pacific Ocean can effect the weather over much of North America. Scientists call it 'sensitive dependence upon initial conditions' and the study of it has generated a whole new realm of science, sometimes called 'non-linear physics,' or, more frankly, 'chaos studies.' My apologies for the delay in posting some new (old) material... given all of the fantastic weather, I somehow misplaced the entire month of August. No doubt it's buried in my garden, or floating in a swimming pool somewhere. I love tall tales and hyperbole, and by happy accident, unearthed this piece while digging for something completely different. Let Lee pull on your leg a bit with this column that was originally published in the King's County Record on November 13th, 1985. The truth, according to someone who should have pretty reliable information on the subject, is seldom pure and never simple. If my neighbors over the years are any indication I would be willing to go out on a limb and venture the opinion that mankind generally has a deep-seated desire to keep anybody from finding out what it is exactly that is going on around the old farmstead. I suppose that it all started out with those two orchard thieves way back when, with their tall tail about the snake telling them what to do. I don't know about you but it always seemed to me that Chief was a little bit gullible on that one. I suppose that he hadn't had much experience with kids at that point - goodness knows, he's had enough since then - but if my youngsters came home with a story about how they really weren't that responsible because it was the horse that told them it would be O.K. to borrow the car, I don't think I would be inclined to go on a vendetta against the whole horsey tribe from henceforth and notwithstanding |
Words & ImagesWe moved to our farm in Sussex, New Brunswick from Toronto in 1977, only moving away in 2014. Archives
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