Amidst expressions of incredulity the American media is discharging its ritual execration of the retail advertising habit of transitioning immediately from Hallowe’en to Christmas. I have always wondered why the Americans seemingly skip over and disregard the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday in November. This is particularly so because I have been led to believe that in America Thanksgiving is more popular than Christmas – except perhaps among certain Republicans who as routinely skew the social nicety of not assuming everyone is either Christian or cares.

This year, Thanksgiving will fall on Nov. 25, which is the fourth Thursday of the month. This has been the way that the date for the holiday has been determined since 1941. Before this, the holiday was traditionally held on the last Thursday of November.

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We’ve lately been treated to exceptionally pleasant weather. It distinguishes itself by being uncommonly welcoming for November which I traditionally associate with grey and chill in keeping with the image of Armistice Day ceremonies. Today by comparison was the warmest it has been. The yellow sunshine poured forth from the blazing orb in the lower sky! Truly it is difficult to exaggerate the splendour of the day! Earlier this morning after our unimpressive 6km bicycle ride about the neighbourhood I threw myself into a rigid chair on the patio in the back garden and stared into the blaze. For the next forty minutes I stared into the blinding rays of sunlight. I dreamt. It was completely soporific.

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It wasn’t before I attended law school at 21 years of age in 1970 that I had to learn to cook. Until then I had survived on Welsh rarebit in boarding school at St. Andrew’s College and cafeteria food while in undergraduate studies at Glendon Hall. My digs at Dalhousie Law School consisted of a shared room not far from the school. It was on the top floor of an ancient white clapboard house (since demolished) on Seymour Street called “Domus Legis“. On the main floor from the front entrance was a spacious room with a fireplace surrounded by high windows. The space was left open to accommodate social gatherings of the students and law professors who all rubbed shoulders as liberally as the beer flowed.  Downstairs in the characteristically stone-walled basement was a dart board.  The top floor was reserved for the residency of four law students, one of whom was a second or third year law student who may have had some involvement with the management or oversight of the property.  The other single room was occupied by John “Jock” McLeish who is now a highly successful practitioner in Toronto. My roommate from Newfoundland was George Horan with whom by entire coincidence I recently reacquainted myself at an art show in Almonte; he was one of the contributing artists.

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shire | ˈʃʌɪə | noun1 British a county, especially in England. • (the Shires) used in reference to parts of England regarded as strongholds of traditional rural culture, especially the rural Midlands.

Though I haven’t a clear idea what constitutes “traditional rural culture”, after having lived here in Almonte since 1976 (45 years ago) I fully suspect that I am a part of the fabric whatever it is; and, similarly that my parts whatever they are have insinuated the whole. Indisputably my entire practice of law (with the exception of articling and my first year with a distinguished Ottawa law firm from 1973 to 1975 upon my Call to the Bar at Osgoode Hall) was fully entwined with local rural tradition, from being an indisputable outsider, the lowest employee in the firm to the traditional though commonplace rural distinction of a sole practitioner.

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Apparently even Currier and Ives knew better than to mention Christmas in the same breath as winter. Yet there is no doubt the consuming public recognized the spirited flavour of the company’s lithographs. To this day popular commercial outlets like Sirius XM have a channel devoted solely to the “Holiday Season“. Not unexpectedly it is replete with historic and so-called “classic” Christmas music surrounding the Christian feast. The insinuation is however far less abrasive than might have once been sustained when people actually harboured mystical additives. Now the spiritual lyrics are viewed as apocryphal or suggestive only, perhaps pagan at their roots, but by many certainly not revitalized by any degree of legitimacy or authenticity.

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Today is about projecting outwardly. It began coincidentally with an obituary.  I was drifting through my Facebook account when I encountered an obituary which I had not yet seen in our local electronic newspaper The Millstone. It was the obituary of a woman who marks one of my first acquaintances in Almonte when I arrived in 1976. She was the principal legal assistant to my employer Michael J. Galligan, QC. Her husband (with whom I later associated when I was a director of Mississippi River Power Corporation) was an employee of The Town of Mississippi Mills.

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It has proven beyond me to determine with authority worth repeating either the meaning or the import of the word “Whig”. I differentiate the two objectives of meaning and import because to my befuddled mind the term Whig, whatever may be its rude etymology, has the import or gist of the more traditionalists of the political ambit. The descriptions and banners of the word have to my mind as well the singularity of attracting capitalist interests primarily – as opposed to what is now called by Marjorie Taylor-Greene “communism”. Otherwise the historic ranks of Whiggism are frightfully varied. The changing cruciality (depending for example in which country the word is employed) invites perpetual and often contradictory demarcations. The divisions have not always been an easy one between Protestants and Roman Catholics; nor between nobles and gentry; nor between town and country; nor indeed between progressive and regressive. Instead the popularity of one or the other is a composition of the whole. As usual the characterization of the Canadian example is overshadowed by that of our brethren of the United States of America where the insinuation of the current meaning in this country most likely began. We, the poor cousins to the north, are bound once again to endure the abasement of precedence. Though in the same breath I acknowledge the sweeping monarchical influence upon our native soil embedded by the United Empire Loyalists since 1763.

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The Declaration of Indulgence, also called Declaration for Liberty of Conscience, was a pair of proclamations made by James II of England and VII of Scotland in 1687. The Indulgence was first issued for Scotland on 12 February and then for England on 4 April 1687. An early step towards establishing freedom of religion in the British Isles, it was cut short by the Glorious Revolution.

The Declaration granted broad religious freedom in England by suspending penal laws enforcing conformity to the Church of England and allowing people to worship in their homes or chapels as they saw fit, and it ended the requirement of affirming religious oaths before gaining employment in government office.

By use of the royal suspending power, the king lifted the religious penal laws and granted toleration to the various Christian denominations, Catholic and Protestant, within his kingdoms. The Declaration of Indulgence was supported by William Penn, who was widely perceived to be its instigator.

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Claudio Giovanni Antonio Monteverdi (baptized 15 May 1567 – 29 November 1643) was an Italian composer, string player, choirmaster, and priest. A composer of both secular and sacred music, and a pioneer in the development of opera, he is considered a crucial transitional figure between the Renaissance and Baroque periods of music history.

There hasn’t to be anything more sedative than Claudio Monteverdi. My unwinding carcass is further soothed by the crisp air circulating the two-wheeler during my constitutional bicycle ride about the neighbourhood. The mixture of blue sky and fluffy white clouds was a vision. The moderate physical performance succeeded as well to expiate my guilt. I have opened one large window and the patio door each a crack. The wind outside is from the north at 19 km/h. According to my weather app the visibility is “perfectly clear right now” (an abnormally good-natured way to put it, I believe).

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“As he approached he found that this tower rose from an embattled pile, low and irregular, yet singularly venerable, which, embowered in verdure, overhung the slugish waters of the Cherwell. He passed through a gateway overhung by a noble orie, and found himself in a spacious cloister adorned with emblems of virtues and vices, rudely carved in grey stone by the masons of the fifteenth century. The table of the society was plentifully spread in a stately refectory hung with paintings, and rich with fantastic carving. The service of the Church was performed morning and evening in a chapel which had suffered much violence from the Reformers, and much from the Puritans, but which was, under every disadvantage, a building of eminent beauty, and which has, in our own time, been restored with rare taste and skill. The spacious gardens along the river side were remarkable for the size of the trees, among which towered conspicuous one of the vegetable wonders of the island, a gigantic oak, older by a century, men said, than the oldest college in the University.”

Excerpt From
The History of England, from the Accession of James II — Volume 2
Thomas Babington Macaulay

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