Christmas columns of yesteryear still light the darkness of December

It is Christmas 1996. I am working as the managing editor of The Kingston Net-Times, during the pioneering days of Canadian online journalism. From day one, we published no print edition and our local stories in that groundbreaking digital newspaper were updated on the fly throughout the day, but there were few bells and whistles, as very, very few of our online readers had cable broadband internet in 1996. Who remembers dial-up?

On Christmas Day 1996, I was called at home by a father who read us online and wondered if we could take a few minutes to put up the famous “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus,” letter to the editor and the editorial response for his young daughter.

The letter and editorial had long been in the public domain. So we did. On Christmas Day.

Eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon wrote the long-ago letter to the editor of the New York Sun, and the quick response was printed as an unsigned editorial Sept. 21, 1897. The response of veteran newsman Francis Pharcellus Church has since become history’s most reprinted newspaper editorial.

A decade later, editing the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News weekly newspapers here in Northern Manitoba, I resumed publishing the “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” letter to the editor from 2007 to 2013:

Dear Editor:

I am eight-years-old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, ‘If you see it in The Sun it’s so.’

Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?

Virginia O’Hanlon
115 West Ninety-fifth Street
New York

In his editorial, Francis Pharcellus Church replied:

Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except [what] they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world, which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Santa Claus! Thank God! He lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

Above the reprinted editorial I would append a bold-faced and italicized introduction, which read:

“Editor’s note: Eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Sun, and the quick response was printed as an unsigned editorial Sept. 21, 1897. The response of veteran newsman Francis Pharcellus Church has since become history’s most reprinted newspaper editorial. We, at the Thompson Citizen, are pleased to be part of that tradition and republishing it at Christmas has become an annual hallmark of the festive season for us here as well since Dec. 19, 2007. Merry Christmas, one and all.

John Barker.”

You can also read it in full here at: https://www.thompsoncitizen.net/opinion/editorial/yes-virginia-there-is-a-santa-claus-1.1367424

While at the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News, I also much enjoyed re-printing for a number of years Garwood Robb’s “A special gift from years ago” as a guest “Soundings” column on the editorial page around Christmas:

“My first teaching assignment was in Thompson in 1968. Mary was a student of mine. She was from an extremely poor and dysfunctional family who lived on the edge of town about a quarter mile from the town’s railway station.

“On the last day of school before Christmas holidays many of the students brought me gifts. Mary never had any money and quite often came to school without lunch. The family was so poor that she shared boots and a winter coat with her brother. One day Alvin got to wear the coat, the next day Mary. For her to bring me a gift was special. It was small wrapped in Kleenex and tied with a piece of dirty string.

“When I opened it, there was a beautiful gold tie bar with a bright red ruby in the centre. In those days men had to wear suits and ties everyday to class. I thanked her for it while reassuring the other students that Mary had not stolen it. In actual fact she had; from the principal’s desk, the previous day.

“I offered to give the tie bar back to the principal in the New Year after I had worn it several times so Mary could see that I liked it and appreciated her gift. Mr. Baxter replied, “If Mary thought so much of you that she had to steal a gift from the principal, then I can surely give up the tie bar.” He offered me the cufflinks too. I refused.

“Mary was a loveable child, 12 years old in Grade 4. Students failed in those days and she had been held back several times. She lived with her mother and her two brothers, one older, one younger in a dilapidated weather-beaten shack. Money and food were always scarce for her family. Quite often I would see Mary begging for money on the street in front of the Thompson Inn on a Saturday night. After Christmas when I returned to Thompson I brought back a doll for Mary from Eaton’s. I secretly sent it home with her so the other girls in my class wouldn’t be jealous and so they wouldn’t say anything to hurt her. Mary had never had a doll and even at 12 that was all she wanted.

“The following winter while the children were home alone, fire destroyed Mary’s home in the middle of the night. Mary and her two siblings perished in the blaze.

“Every Christmas for nearly 40 years when I decorate our Christmas tree I unpack that gold tie bar with the red ruby and hang it in a very prominent place on the tree.

“Somewhere out there on Christmas night there is a shining star of a little girl who had a heart of gold but never had enough chances to show it.”

The column was first published in the Grandview Exponent, which serves the communities of Grandview and Gilbert Plains in the Parkland region of Manitoba, on Dec. 20, 2005, and later republished in Garwood Robb’s blog, “In My Own Words,” which is no longer available online at http://garwood2009.blogspot.ca/2009/12/memory-from-long-agorevisited.html  but can still be read at https://www.thompsoncitizen.net/opinion/soundings-4274851 

Garwood lived on Centennial Drive East in Thompson and taught at Westwood Elementary School from September 1968 to June 1972 when he moved to Winnipeg.

Two of my other favourite columns that would find their way into print at Christmas in the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News were David J. Thompson’s “The night the lights were lit!,” which tells the story of Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, and the humble origins of the modern co-operative movement:

“On Dec. 21, 1844 the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society opened a small store in England with five items and little fanfare. Thus humbly began the modern co-operative movement. Let’s step back into that time to get a sense of how co-operative history was made.

“In the summer of 1843, a 31-year-old Charles Dickens journeyed to Lancashire, to see for himself how life was lived in the industrial north of England. To feed his insatiable journalistic curiosity, he visited a workhouse in Manchester to see how the poor were surviving the “hungry forties.” Dickens was taken aback by the terrible conditions he saw in the midst of the burgeoning wealth. In the bustling heartland of the Industrial Revolution he saw the two Englands of rich and poor.

“The next day, speaking to an audience of well-to-do aristocrats and mill owners at Manchester’s prestigious Athenaeum Club, he urged the audience to overcome their ignorance which he said was “the most prolific parent of misery and crime.” Dickens asked them to take action with the workers to “share a mutual duty and responsibility” to society. On the train back to London, impacted greatly by the poverty and misery he had seen, he conceptualized A Christmas Carol. He began writing the classic Christmas story a week later and completed it in six weeks. Since the book was published on Dec. 19, 1843, Christmas has never been the same.

“On the eve of revolutions throughout Europe, Dickens counselled that hearts must hear and eyes must see for society to change. In Dickens’ mind, the Bob Cratchits and Tiny Tims of the world would have to wait for the Ebenezer Scrooges to literally go through hell before heaven could be made upon Earth. Dickens later returned to the Lancashire mill towns to gather information for a later novel Hard Times. Dickens solution in much of his writing was the voluntary transformation of the rich and powerful.

“However, for Dickens, A Christmas Carol was semi-autobiographical reflecting his father having been in debtor’s prison and the suffering within his own family. It was also a social commentary on the tremendous conflicts transforming British society from top to bottom as a result of the Industrial Revolution. However, Scrooge’s peaceful transformation was not repeated enough by a self-interested industrial aristocracy. Five years later, revolutions occupied centre stage in much of Europe.

“In the summer of 1843, at the time Dickens visited Manchester a group of Bob Cratchits and their spouses were meeting regularly just 11 miles away in the nearby town of Rochdale. One of the Pioneers, John Kershaw recalled a key step in organizing the co-op,” A few days before Christmas, 1843, a circular was issued calling a delegates meeting to be held at the Weavers Arms, Cheetham Street, nearToad Toad Lane.” At that meeting, the Rochdale families decided that rather than wait for the mill owners to do something for them they just better do it for themselves. It took the determined mill workers almost two years before they had collected enough of their meagre savings to open up their small co-op. Their immediate aim was to get better quality food at decent prices and give some of them jobs. Their ultimate goal was to use the co-op’s profits to create their own community where working and living conditions would be better. Amongst the “satanic mills” they would build their “New Jerusalem.”

“The winter solstice on Dec. 21 was the longest night of the year. Under the old Gregorian calendar, Dec. 21 was also Christmas Day. The co-op opened almost one year to the day after the publication of A Christmas Carol. However for the members of the newly formed co-op called the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society the holiday season would not be one of gifts or gaiety but of consternation and caution.

“On that Saturday night at 8 p.m., a small group of the Rochdale Pioneers and their families huddled together in the shop to witness the store’s opening. The temperature was below freezing made worse by the damp in the almost empty warehouse at 31 Toad Lane (T’Owd is dialect for the old Lane) in Rochdale. Outside on the busy lane they could hear the clattering of wooden clogs on the cobbled streets. The tired mill workers were hurrying home to find warmth from the winter’s chill. As the church bells across the street struck the appointed hour, the founding members heard each chime with beating hearts. Then, James Smithies went outside and bravely took the shutters off the windows. With the final shutter removed and a few candles bravely lighting the store’s bay windows the modern cooperative movement began. This little shop in Rochdale, England would be its lowly birthplace and these humble hard working families its founders.

Thompson’s column is also available online at: https://www.thompsoncitizen.net/opinion/the-night-the-lights-were-lit-4279065

The other column that I quite enjoyed reprinting was “The Gold and Ivory Tablecloth” by Howard C. Schade, the pastor between 1935 and 1940 of the Second Reformed Church in Coxsackie, New York, between the Catskill Mountains and Hudson River. “The Gold and “Ivory Tablecloth, perhaps more allegorical than literally true, was originally published in the December 1954 issue of Reader’s Digest magazine. Schade wrote:

“At Christmas time men and women everywhere gather in their churches to wonder anew at the greatest miracle the world has ever known. But the story I like best to recall was not a miracle, not exactly.

“It happened to a pastor who was very young. His church was very old. Once, long ago, it had flourished. Famous men had preached from its pulpit, prayed before its altar. Rich and poor alike had worshipped there and built it beautifully. Now the good days had passed from the section of town where it stood. But the pastor and his young wife believed in their run-down church. They felt that with paint, hammer, and faith they could get it in shape. Together they went to work.

“But late in December a severe storm whipped through the river valley, and the worst blow fell on the little church, a huge chunk of rain, soaked plaster fell out of the inside wall just behind the altar. Sorrowfully the pastor and his wife swept away the mess, but they couldn’t hide the ragged hole.

“The pastor looked at it and had to remind himself quickly. “Thy will be done!” But his wife wept, “Christmas is only two days away!”

“That afternoon the dispirited couple attended the auction held for the benefit of a youth group.

“The auctioneer opened a box and shook out of its folds a handsome gold and ivory lace tablecloth. It was a magnificent item, nearly 15 feet long, but it too, dated from a long vanished era. Who, today, had any use for such a thing? There were a few half-hearted bids. Then the pastor was seized with what he thought was a great idea.

“He bid it in for $6.50.

“He carried the cloth back to the church and tacked it up on the wall behind the altar. It completely hid the hole! And the extraordinary beauty of its shimmering handwork cast a fine, holiday glow over the chancel. It was a great triumph. Happily he went back to preparing his Christmas sermon.

“Just before noon on the day of Christmas Eve, as the pastor was opening the church, he noticed a woman standing in the cold at the bus stop. “The bus won’t be here for 40 minutes!” he called, and invited her into the church to get warm.

“She told him that she had come from the city that morning to be interviewed for a job as governess to the children of one of the wealthy families in town but she had been turned down. A war refugee, her English was imperfect.

“The woman sat down in a pew and chafed her hands and rested. After a while she dropped her head and prayed. She looked up as the pastor began to adjust the great gold and ivory cloth across the hole. She rose suddenly and walked up the steps of the chancel. She looked at the tablecloth. The pastor smiled and started to tell her about the storm damage, but she didn’t seem to listen. She took up a fold of the cloth and rubbed it between her fingers.

“It is mine!” she said. “It is my banquet cloth!” She lifted up a corner and showed the surprised pastor that there were initials monogrammed on it. “My husband had the cloth made especially for me in Brussels! There could not be another like it.”

“For the next few minutes the woman and the pastor talked excitedly together. She explained that she was Viennese, that she and her husband had opposed the Nazis and decided to leave the country. They were advised to go separately. Her husband put her on a train for Switzerland. They planned that he would join her as soon as he could arrange to ship their household goods across the border. She never saw him again. Later she heard that he had died in a concentration camp.

“‘I have always felt that it was my fault, to leave without him,’ she said. “Perhaps these years of wandering have been my punishment!” The pastor tried to comfort her and urged her to take the cloth with her. She refused. Then she went away.

As the church began to fill on Christmas Eve, it was clear that the cloth was going to be a great success. It had been skillfully designed to look its best by candlelight.

After the service, the pastor stood at the doorway. Many people told him that the church looked beautiful. One gentle-faced middle-aged man, he was the local cloth and watch repairman, looked rather puzzled.

“It is strange,” he said in his soft accent. “Many years ago my wife, God rest her, and I owned such a cloth. In our home in Vienna, my wife put it on the table”, and here he smiled, “only when the bishop came to dinner.”

“The pastor suddenly became very excited. He told the jeweller about the woman who had been in church earlier that day. The started jeweller clutched the pastor’s arm. “Can it be? Does she live?”

“Together the two got in touch with the family who had interviewed her. Then, in the pastor’s car they started for the city. And as Christmas Day was born, this man and his wife, who had been separated through so many saddened Yuletides, were reunited.

“To all who hear this story, the joyful purpose of the storm that had knocked a hole in the wall of the church was now quite clear. Of course, people said it was a miracle, but I think you will agree it was the season for it!

“True love seems to find a way.”

Schade’s column is also available online at: https://www.thompsoncitizen.net/opinion/the-gold-and-ivory-tablecloth-4275996

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

.

 

 

Thompson Community Christmas Dinner and other traditions, times and places

Back a couple of weeks ago on Dec. 2, I noted a Facebook comment on my timeline from one of my oldest friends from high school in Oshawa some 40-and-more years ago now. It was one of those by-the-way (BTW) remarks that was an addendum to the main and unrelated comment. “ Incidentally, I am asking my loved ones how they usually spend their Christmas Day and the holidays in general. Would you care to elaborate about your usual traditions,” Annie asked. I was originally going to answer it right there, but it got me thinking, that maybe I’d wait and write a fuller, more complete post here on the question before Christmas. It’s an interesting topic, and I’m grateful for it as a writing idea that I hadn’t really thought about directly in a broader sense, although I have written a bit about Christmas movie traditions in the past. But Christmas is about more than movies when it comes to traditions.

Annie, who for many, many years now has lived in Ottawa, noted that one of her traditions is that she volunteers “at a soup kitchen at an Anglican church just up the street from my place.”

That’s the kind of tradition, it would seem to me is well worth emulating, although I am sorry to say, I haven’t come close. Way back in 2008, the second Christmas I lived in Thompson, Manitoba, I volunteered in the kitchen at St. Joseph’s Ukrainian Catholic Hall for the Thompson Community Christmas Dinner, which has been an annual holiday staple here since 1991, where folks are treated to a free turkey dinner with all the trimmings on Dec. 25.  Another year, Bobbi Montean oversaw Jeanette and me, and a number of other volunteer drivers, delivering Christmas dinners to shut-ins who couldn’t make it out to St. Joe’s. What I remember best about that experience was that it was dark, very dark, and I was still relatively new to Thompson in terms of knowing the geography (a fact I apparently didn’t know until we started the deliveries), and it was brutally cold. But what am I saying. It is brutally cold every year (or at least it is in my memory)!

A couple of years ago, I also peeled some potatoes under the watchful eye of Nelson Pruder for the community dinner Christmas Eve, and a few other times Jeanette and I have I’ve turned out to take part in and enjoy some ad hoc music-making, and enjoy a turkey plate ourselves Christmas day.

Throughout the last 28 years, local members of the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA), St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, former Chicken Chef owner Dale Shantz, the Pruder family, particularly Emily, as well as Harlie, and Nelson, who took over from the local branch of the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) in organizing the annual Christmas Day event in 2013, and for the last two years, Mayor Colleen Smook, in her capacity as a private citizen, not as mayor, although if you know Colleen and you know the North, the two are kinda inseparable in some ways, and one of her daughters, Sharon Cordell, and her daughter, Tori Jade Cordell, have led the Thompson Community Christmas Dinner preparation and cooking effort. The dinner ends up feeding around 180 people each year. I worked with Sharon briefly a few years ago in what is now the Wellington & Madeleine Spence Memorial Library on the University College of the North’s Thompson Campus, so I am not at all surprised at this. Like Colleen, Sharon is all about community, albeit with perhaps a bit of an iron fist in a velvet glove activism when necessary to get people’s attention that something is important.

Christmas traditions are important, but not immutable, I think. To some extent, they seem to me to be dependent on where we are both in life, as it were, and geography, which even in a very virtual world, still matters.

One of the earliest family traditions I can recall is that of celebrating my grandfather, William Barker, same name as my dad’s, Christmas day birthday every Dec. 25. My grandfather had what I thought of as his “plant room” in a second-floor room of my grandparents’ home on Verdun Road in Oshawa. I spent a fair bit of time in it in the mid-1960s. It had large southwest facing windows, ideal for growing plants inside in the winter. My grandmother, who died in January 1965 when I was seven, lived long enough to instill a life-long love of Christmas fruitcake in me, whether it be from the monks of Le Magasin de l’Abbayea Val Notre-Dame in Saint-Jean-de-Matha, Quebec, or my local Safeway’s honey and ground almond marzipan-icing topped fruitcake, a love I was astonished to learn later in life is not shared by everyone. My grandfather, who died when I was 10 in September 1967, was hard of hearing, so from him I learned to speak loud enough to be heard even as a child, which has proved useful over the years. I also learned to love the raspberry canes in his garden and simplicity from my grandfather Barker.

My dad, after reportedly being a bit of a hell-raiser in the 1940s and 1950s – especially up at our Pop-In Cottage on Lake Simcoe – when he got together with his favourite brother-in-laws – Ray Seager, Fred Porter and Pat O’Leary – laid off the booze after his second bout of kidney stones, he told me years later.

But I well remember as a boy going into the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) on Richmond Street West at Centre Street in Oshawa the Saturday before Christmas every year to pick up a mickey of Canadian Five Star whisky (and in those days in the 1960s and 1970s the bottle actually had a plastic five-point star on the outside, not some chintzy image-only on the label) for my dad to have on hand for Uncle Ray, Uncle Fred and Uncle Pat Christmas night, when our family would gather at our home at 537 Nipigon Street in Oshawa to celebrate my grandfather’s birthday with a party. In those days before customer self-serve and wine and liquor lists, dad would peruse the list, even though he always picked up the Canadian Five Star whisky, but didn’t pick it up before he filled out his order slip by pen or pencil and handed it to the clerk at the counter, who would then purposefully retrieve it from some pigeonhole in the mysterious area at back.

As I’d say many years later living in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, “we had ourselves a time” at those long ago Christmas birthday parties!

From 1978 to 1991, I spent many a happy Christmas ensconced at the Dell family’s Noone House, built in 1820, on what is now Old Jaffrey Road in Peterborough, New Hampshire, or enjoying a hot toddy in nearby Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire at the Fitzwilliam Inn, built in 1796 as a stop on the old coaching road system between Boston and points north. I still marvel at the memory of opening Christmas presents for the first time in the Noone House library. A room completely given over to being a library in a private family home was almost beyond the ken of my imagination in 1978. While it seems like another lifetime ago now, and perhaps was in many respects, my memories of the love and hospitality extended to me by Heather, and her family, including her sister, Sara, brother Chad, and her parents, Ed and Carol Dell, remain among the post precious I cherish and treasure to this day. It is often said that grace is an “unmerited favour” or gift from God. My Christmas holiday time spent in New England over those 14 years as a young man from my early 20s to mid-30s is surely testament to that.

As Frank Sinatra sang so famously in 1968 in Jacques Revaux’s “My Way,” written a year earlier in France, “Regrets, I’ve had a few,” there will always be a tinge of sadness for the remembrance of things past. But I am also reminded of the words of C.S. Lewis, perhaps the finest apologist for Christianity of the 20th century, from the 1993 movie Shadowlands, where he says, “The pain now is part of the happiness then. That’s the deal.”

Coincidentally, if there are really coincidences, Chad Walsh, a mid-life convert from atheism to Christianity, as was Clive Staples Lewis, much better known by his initials C.S. Lewis, or to family, friends and academic colleagues, Jack Lewis, and his, wife, Helen Joy Davidman, also a convert from atheism to Christianity, wrote a biographical article on C.S. Lewis for the New York Times in 1948, and Walsh published the first biography of Lewis a few months later, entitled C.S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics, and was a close friend and neighbour of the Dell family on Lake Iroquois in Vermont, where both families had summer cottages.

Walsh, a nationally noted poet and author, was an English professor at Beloit College in Wisconsin. After moving to Beloit to teach there in 1945, he discovered a new interest in Christianity as a result of reading T.S. Eliot and Reinhold Niebuhr, and he joined the Episcopal Church and was ordained as an Episcopal priest in 1949. Ed Dell was also later ordained as an Episcopal priest, and Walsh was one of the most significant mentors and friends in his life, while Lewis, whom he had met, had a towering intellectual influence on him, which is saying something, as Ed Dell was neither easily impressed nor suffered fools gladly.

Helen Joy Davidman “corresponded with Chad Walsh about her many questions related to Lewis’s books and her new-found faith,” noted Lyle Dorsett, Billy Graham Professor of Evangelism at the Beeson Divinity School at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, in a 2005 article, “Helen Joy Davidman (Mrs. C.S. Lewis) 1915-1960: A Portrait,” published in Knowing & Doing, the quarterly journal of the C.S. Lewis Institute in Springfield, Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C.  “Walsh understood and respected Joy’s pilgrimage so he and his wife, Eva, frequently entertained Joy and her boys at their summer cottage at Lake Iroquois, Vermont,” said Dorsett.

C.S. Lewis died in 1963 when I was only six years old, but I did have the distinct privilege of meeting and sharing a brief bit of time and conversation at that same cottage in the late 1970s with Chad and Eva Walsh.

Some of my traditions date back many years, others are of much more recent vintage, and are perhaps best described as being on the road to becoming tradition, although exactly where that demarcation line is drawn, is not completely clear to me. Take food for instance. I have been making sausage meat dressing or stuffing for the Christmas turkey for so long I can’t quite remember how or when I started. But I’ve made it everywhere it seems. For my parents, for my relatives in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, here in Thompson, Manitoba, you name it.  Perhaps my fondest sausage meat dressing memories go back to 1994 or 1995 in Kingston, Ontario, when I was a graduate student at Queen’s University, and where I made what seemed many pounds and pans of stuffing, or at least so it seemed at the time, one Christmas dinner a quarter century ago now, for participants in Project Reconciliation, a volunteer-based effort, located in the basement of First Baptist Church at the corner of Johnson and Sydenham streets, and aimed at helping recently released federal parolees to integrate back into their local community. The standard joke in Kingston was that nearly all the residents of the Limestone City were either connected to the universities or federal penitentiaries, of which there were nine at the time, and it was often hard to tell at a glance who was connected with which institution.

On the other hand, making Land O’Lakes sour cream cornbread, with my own recipe addition of cream cheese, is much more recent, something I only started doing several years ago here in Thompson, but which I am happy to keep baking until it become a true tradition in time.

Likewise, it is only here in Thompson that I have resumed a tradition that I had long gotten away from: chopping down my own Christmas tree. Jeanette and I had been doing it intermittently since 2008, but if we make it out this year in the next nine days, it will be our third consecutive year since 2017 cutting down Christmas trees for both of us off Jonas Road, south of Thompson. The first year in 2017, the snow was already so deep, Jeanette used snowshoes to get in the adjacent bush with a hand-held saw.

I am also connected to long tradition at midnight mass at St. Lawrence Church here in Thompson, when I see Father Guna, robed in his white and gold sacramental vestments, swinging a thurible, a metal censer suspended from chains and holding burning incense – a scene I find comforting and liturgically meaningful in both sight and smell. Too often, we forget that as Catholics we use all our senses in a participatory way in worship.

Likewise, we recall the Great Antiphons, known as the O antiphons, those Magnificat antiphons chanted or recited at Vespers of the Liturgy of the Hours during the last seven days of Advent preparation known as the Octave before Christmas and also heard as the alleluia verses on the same days from Dec. 17 to Dec. 23 inclusive at mass.

They are referred to as the O antiphons because the title of each one begins with the interjection “O”: O Sapientia (O Wisdom); O Adonai (O Ruler of the House of Israel); O Radix Jesse (O Root of Jesse); O Clavis David (O Key of David); O Oriens (O Rising Dawn); O Rex Gentium (O King of the Nations); and O Emmanuel (O God With Us). Taking the first letter of each and reversing the order – Emmanuel, Rex, Oriens, Clavis, Radix, Adonai, Sapientia – gives the Latin words ero cras, which means “tomorrow I will come.”

While the exact origins of the polyphonous O antiphons are now shrouded by the mist of time, they probably date back to the late 5th or 6th early century. At the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Benoit-sur-Loire in France,  also known as the Abbey of Fleury or Abbaye Saint-Benoît de Fleury, one of the oldest Benedictine abbeys in Western Europe, founded in the 6th century, the O antiphons were traditionally recited by the abbot and other abbey leaders in descending rank, and then a gift was given to each member of the community.

We Catholics also share a collective memory and remember our saints and martyrs in Eucharistic Prayer 1, an essential of the rubrics comprising the Roman Canon or Missal, with origins that reach as far back as the 4th century, and which made an indelible mark on my Catholic boyhood, although it doesn’t have quite the same resonance for most of my Protestant friends, I’ve found.

“In union with the whole Church we honour Mary, the ever-virgin mother of Jesus Christ our Lord and God. We honour Joseph, her husband, the apostles and martyrs Peter and Paul, Andrew, James, John, Thomas, James, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Simon and Jude; we honour Linus, Cletus, Clement, Sixtus, Cornelius, Cyprian, Lawrence, Chrysogonus, John and Paul, Cosmas and Damian and all the saints. May their merits and prayers gain us your constant help and protection … to us, also, your sinful servants, who hope in your abundant mercies, graciously grant some share and fellowship with your holy apostles and martyrs: with John the Baptist, Stephen, Matthias, Barnabas, Ignatius, Alexander, Marcellinus, Peter, Felicity, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia, Anastasia and all your saints: admit us, we beg you, into their company, not weighing our merits, but granting us your pardon….”

Every pope from Peter up to and including Sixtus II, beheaded Aug. 6, 258 under the edict of Roman Emperor Valerian, was a saint and martyr, including Linus, Anacletus (Cletus), Clement I, Evaristus, Alexander I, Sixtus I (also called Xystus I), Telesphorus, Hyginus, Pius I, Anicetus, Soter, Eleutherius, Victor I, Zephyrinus, Callistus I, Urban I, Pontain, Anterus, Fabian, Cornelius, Lucius I and Stephen I. Sixtus II was the 24th pope.

Christmas movies also are a part of my Christmas tradition.  And what, after all, is Christmas without an annual debate over whether Die Hard properly qualifies as a Christmas movie.

Die Hard, directed by John McTiernan and written by Steven E. de Souza and Jeb Stuart, follows the Christmas Eve exploits of John McClane (Bruce Willis), playing an off-duty New York City cop visiting in Los Angeles for the holidays to see his estranged wife, Holly Gennaro McClane (Bonnie Bedelia), and two daughters, as he takes on a group of highly organized criminals, led by Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman), at a holiday party in the L.A. skyscraper that is the American headquarters of the Japanese-owned business Holly works for, as Gruber and his men stage a heist under the guise of a terrorist attack using hostages, including Holly, to keep police at bay.

Die Hard is based on Roderick Thorp’s 1979 novel Nothing Lasts Forever, and was the sequel to 1966’s The Detective, which was adapted into a 1968 film of the same name that starred Frank Sinatra. Willis, not the first choice for the role (Sinatra declined to reprise his role 20 years after The Detective and action star Arnold Schwarzenegger turned the part down) was known primarily as a comedic television actor in 1988, particularly for co-starring as a private detective with Cybill Shepherd in Moonlighting on ABC between March 1985 and May 1989.

Die Hard changed all that and made Willis into an action star. Made for $28 million, Die Hard has grossed more than $140 million theatrically worldwide. The film’s success has spawned four sequels to date: Die Hard 2 in 1990; Die Hard with a Vengeance in 1995; Live Free or Die Hard in 2007 and a Good Day to Die Hard in 2013.

“Among the many holiday nods — 12 bad guys, wife named Holly, giant teddy bear gift in waiting and endless Christmas decor — there’s also a film score featuring ominous renditions of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy sprinkled with the jingling of sleigh bells,” Chin notes http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/die-hard-christmas-movie-debate-calgary-eyeopener-1.4450305

Mark Hughes, a film and television screenwriter, who has also worked as a media specialist and campaign ad writer. Hughes penned a piece for Forbes magazine on Dec. 14, 2011, where he picked Die Hard as number one on his list of “Top Ten Best Christmas Movies Of All Time,” as the story was headlined.

Wrote Hughes: “Die Hard is everything every Christmas movie should always be forever. It’s a mix of the baddie from The Grinch Who Stole Christmas; the unbeatable hero who shows up to teach everyone a lesson from Miracle On 34th Street; the ghosts of past, present, and future who bring insight and change from A Christmas Carol; plus every redemptive struggle about family and personal evolution and good versus evil, all wrapped up in a big shiny box with a bow made of explosions and bullets. There’s Christmas, and then there’s Christmas with punching terrorists in the face and winning back your entire family – which do YOU prefer? It doesn’t matter what you prefer, actually, because Bruce Willis prefers the latter, and Bruce Willis always wins. You’d know that if you watched the Die Hard movies. So start watching now, beginning with this one….”

While I’ve added Die Hard to my annual Christmas viewing list (at least some years), Dickens it ain’t.

Charles Dickens, a heterodox Anglican if ever there was one, of course, wrote A Christmas Carol after he journeyed to Lancashire at the age of 31 in the summer of 1843 to see for himself how life was lived in the industrial north of England. On the train back to London, impacted by the poverty and misery he had seen, he conceptualized A Christmas Carol on the eve of revolutions throughout Europe, counselling that hearts must hear and eyes must see for society to change. He began writing the classic Christmas story a week later. He completed the book that fall in six weeks and the book was published on Dec. 19, 1843, the 177th anniversary of which falls on Tuesday. Since the book was published in 1843, Christmas has never been the same.

“A merry Christmas, Bob!” said Scrooge, with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back. “A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you, for many a year! I’ll raise your salary, and endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of Smoking Bishop, Bob!”

Jeanette has a particular fondness for Linus, Charlie Brown, Lucy and Snoopy in A Charlie Brown Christmas, made in 1965 and one of the most successful animated Christmas specials in TV history. Peanuts creator Charles Schulz and animator Bill Melendez wrote the outline in one day, and the musical score was written by jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi. ABC celebrated its 50th anniversary two years ago with a special showing Nov. 30, 2015.

Me, I also like It’s a Wonderful Life, produced and directed by Frank Capra, based on the short story The Greatest Gift, written by Philip Van Doren Stern in 1939.

The film stars Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey, a man who has given up his dreams in order to help others, and whose imminent suicide on Christmas Eve brings about the intervention of his guardian angel, Clarence Odbody (Henry Travers). Clarence shows George all the lives he has touched and how different life in his community of Bedford Falls, New York would be had he never been born. Film historian James Berardinelli has commented on the parallels between It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol, noting that in both stories, a man revisits his life and potential death (or non-existence) with the help of spirits or angels, culminating in a joyous epiphany and a renewed sense of purpose and life.

It’s a Wonderful Life, released in 1946, is one of the most acclaimed films ever made, and was nominated for five Academy Awards including Best Picture, and has been recognized by the American Film Institute as one of the 100 best American films ever made.

Initially, however, it did middling business at the box office and opened to at best mixed reviews.

For their part, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) weighed in on May 26, 1947 with a memo stating: “With regard to the picture It’s a Wonderful Life, [redacted] stated in substance that the film represented rather obvious attempts to discredit bankers by casting Lionel Barrymore as a ‘scrooge-type’ so that he would be the most hated man in the picture. This, according to these sources, is a common trick used by Communists. [In] addition, [redacted] stated that, in his opinion, this picture deliberately maligned the upper class, attempting to show the people who had money were mean and despicable characters.”

In a similar vein to It’s a Wonderful Life, another movie destined to become a  Christmas classic, Miracle on 34th Street, was released a year later in 1947. An old man going by the name of Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn) fills in for an intoxicated Santa in Macy’s annual Thanksgiving Day parade. Kringle proves to be such a hit that he is soon appearing regularly at the chain’s main store in midtown Manhattan.

The Christmas movie genre is a rather big tent one, as we Catholics like to say. Who can forget the electrifying Griswold family of Chicago? National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation is a 1989 Christmas comedy directed by Jeremiah S. Chechik, written by John Hughes, and starring Chevy Chase, Beverly D’Angelo and Randy Quaid, with Juliette Lewis and Johnny Galecki as the Griswold children Audrey and Rusty. It is the third installment in National Lampoon’s Vacation film series.

More perhaps in the Die Hard vein, or at least not in the Frank Capra one, are some other Christmas bad-ass classics, including Canada’s 1974 contribution, the under appreciated genre classic Black Christmas, starring Olivia Hussey, Keir Dullea, Margot Kidder, Andrea Martin, Marian Waldman and John Saxon.

The story follows a group of sorority sisters who are receiving threatening phone calls, while being stalked and murdered during the holiday season by a deranged murderer hiding in the attic of their sorority house.

Inspired by a series of murders that took place in the Westmount section of Montreal, the part urban legend “The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs,” and the true crime unsolved slaying of Janett Christman on the evening of March 18, 1950  in Columbia, Missouri, A. Roy Moore composed the script, which was originally titled Stop Me. Upon American director Bob Clark’s involvement, numerous alterations were made, primarily the shifting to a university setting with young adult characters. Parts of Black Christmas were filmed on the University of Toronto campus.

Nine years later in 1983, Clark would make the light-hearted Christmas classic A Christmas Story, following the adventures of youngster Ralphie Parker (Peter Billingsley), who spends most of his time dodging a bully (Zack Ward) and dreaming of his ideal Christmas gift, a “Red Ryder air rifle.”

The film was shot on an estimated budget of $620,000 in Toronto in the winter of 1973–74. Black Christmas was purchased by Warner Bros., who distributed the film in North America, releasing it in Canada on Oct. 11, 1974.

In the United States, Warner Bros. timed the release with the Christmas holiday, releasing it on Dec. 20, 1974. It screened at theaters in the United States through late 1975, and would internationally gross over $4 million at the box office.

It took some years after its release, but eventually Black Christmas would receive praise from film critics and historians for being one of the earliest films of its type to conclude without revealing the identity of its villain. It has also earned a following as a cult classic. The film is generally considered to be one of the earliest slasher films,  serving as an influence for Halloween four years later in 1978.

And speaking of Christmas slasher films, who can forget the now 1984 Christmas cult classic Silent Night, Deadly Night, directed by Charles E. Sellier Jr., and starring Robert Brian Wilson, Lilyan Chauvin, Gilmer McCormick, Toni Nero, Linnea Quigley, Britt Leach and Leo Geter. Set during Christmas, the story concerns a young man, Billy, who suffers from post-traumatic stress over witnessing his parents’ Christmas Eve murder and his subsequent upbringing in an abusive Catholic orphanage. In adulthood, the Christmas holiday leads him into a psychological breakdown, and he emerges as a spree killer donning a Santa suit.

After negative reviews and something of a public outcry, the film was pulled from theaters a week after its release on Nov. 9, 1984.

Also part of the Christmas movie genre is Bad Santa, made in 2003 and directed by Terry Zwigoff, and starring Billy Bob Thornton, Tony Cox, Lauren Graham, Brett Kelly, Lauren Tom, John Ritter, and Bernie Mac. It was John Ritter’s last live action film appearance before his death on Sept. 11, 2003. The Coen brothers, Ethan and Joel, were the film’s executive producers.

Willie T. Soke (Billy Bob Thornton)and his dwarf assistant Marcus Skidmore (Tony Cox) are professional thieves. Every year, Willie disguises himself as a department store Santa Claus and Marcus disguises himself as an elf in order for both of them to rob shopping malls at night, using Marcus’ wife Lois as their getaway driver and accomplice. Marcus takes his duty as an elf seriously, but Willie is a sex-addicted alcoholic, and is gradually unable to appropriately perform his Santa duties with children, plus his safe-cracking performance is being affected, much to Marcus’ dismay. When they are hired at the Saguaro Square Mall in Phoenix, the vulgar remarks made by Willie shock the prudish mall manager Bob Chipeska, who brings them to the attention of security chief Gin Slagel.

While some Christmas movies have quickly entered the pantheon of yuletide classics to virtual universal acclaim, others become classics more slowly over time, or perhaps as niche classics; Christmas favourites, but not for everyone.

Over the last several years, Christmas with a Capital C, directed by Helmut Schleppi, and shot in February 2010 in Seward in southern Alaska in an inlet on the Kenai Peninsula, has become a favourite for me to watch when the time arrives for Christmas movies.

Hometown Mayor Dan Reed (Ted McGinley) looks forward to each year with enthusiasm to all the events, friends and family that fill this special season in the small fictional town of Trapper Falls, Alaska (Seward).

Together with his brother Greg (Brad Stine), they dedicate time away from their adventure tour company to spread Christmas cheer, including annually putting up a 50-year-old  hand-craved nativity set, given years ago to the town, in the public square.

Probably no need for a spoiler alert even if I tell you Christmas with a Capital C is a Pure Flix Entertainment Christian filmmaking entry in the culture wars and the so-called “War on Christmas” by secularists.  Pure Flix Entertainment is owned by David. A.R. White, raised in a small Mennonite farming town outside of Dodge City, Kansas, brothers Kevin and Bobby Downes, and Michael Scott.

The Christian filmmaking genre, as I wrote in a post headlined “Flying largely under the mainstream cinematic radar: Christian movie genre is ‘hot’” back on Sept. 15, 2014 (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/15/flying-largely-under-the-mainstream-cinematic-radar-christian-movie-genre-is-hot/) regularly gets knocked — and truth be told, not unfairly often — by more “secular moviegoers for its heavy-handed theological scripts, clunky acting and cheesy sets, with mainly bad films, which, to be charitable, do little more than preach to the choir.”

Given that Christmas with a Capital C centers in part  — although it will turn out not to be the main point  — around the United States Constitution’s First Amendment Establishment Clause, which prohibits the government from making any law respecting an establishment of religion and not only forbids the government from establishing an official religion, but also prohibits government actions that unduly favor one religion over another, as well as prohibiting the government from unduly preferring religion over non-religion, or non-religion over religion, it can be a bit clunky going at times. Christmas with a Capital C may hold the distinction of being the first movie of the genre where the words “Establishment Clause” are actually uttered on screen. The plot has Dan’s old high school rival Mitch Bright (Daniel Baldwin), a mean-spirited and embittered militant atheist returning home after 20 years, Dan is immediately suspicious. Mitch is a highly successful big city lawyer who has never wanted anything to do with Trapper Falls.

Their rivalry re-ignites when the frustrated Mitch takes offense to what he sees as the town’s violation of his rights. Mitch wants the nativity scene removed from the front of City Hall and the word Christmas switched to Happy Holidays on all signs. Fifty years of tradition are now challenged not by an outsider but a former member of the community. As the conflict escalates it goes beyond one person’s opinion but magnifies into an entire town problem when Mitch enters into the mayoral race to have Dan replaced.

In the heat of the legal battle and facing certain defeat, Dan’s wife Kristen (Nancy Stafford) and their daughter Makayla (Francesca Derosa) wanting to show, what she believes to be, the true meaning of Christmas are inspired to launch a “Christmas with a Capital C” campaign as an effort to keep the town together. In doing so they discover the secret behind Mitch’s return.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

 

 

 

 

 

‘Yippee Ki Yay’ …. Die Hard: The ultimate Christmas heart warmer

And so this is Christmas, John Lennon noted in 1972. Time once again then to watch the greatest Christmas movies ever made and debate that age-old question (at least since 1988): Is the explosive action thriller Die Hard, starring Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman, the ultimate Christmas heart warmer, the greatest of them all? I jest not.

Falice Chin, a producer with CBC Radio One for Calgary Eyeopener, is one of the latest to weigh in. Chin posted an online analysis piece for CBC News Dec. 15, headlined “Why Die Hard is the ultimate Christmas movie — despite naysayers.”

Die Hard, directed by John McTiernan and written by Steven E. de Souza and Jeb Stuart, follows the Christmas Eve exploits of John McClane (Bruce Willis), playing an off-duty New York City cop visiting in Los Angeles for the holidays to see his estranged wife, Holly Gennaro McClane (Bonnie Bedelia), and two daughters, as he takes on a group of highly organized criminals, led by Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman), at a holiday party in the L.A. skyscraper that is the American headquarters of the Japanese-owned business Holly works for, as Gruber and his men stage a heist under the guise of a terrorist attack using hostages, including Holly, to keep police at bay.

Die Hard is based on Roderick Thorp’s 1979 novel Nothing Lasts Forever, and was the sequel to 1966’s The Detective, which was adapted into a 1968 film of the same name that starred Frank Sinatra. Willis, not the first choice for the role (Sinatra declined to reprise his role 20 years after The Detective and action star Arnold Schwarzenegger turned the part down) was known primarily as a comedic television actor in 1988, particularly for co-starring as a private detective with Cybill Shepherd in Moonlighting on ABC between March 1985 and May 1989.

Die Hard changed all that and made Willis into an action star. Made for $28 million, Die Hard has grossed more than $140 million theatrically worldwide. The film’s success has spawned four sequels to date: Die Hard 2 in 1990; Die Hard with a Vengeance in 1995; Live Free or Die Hard in 2007 and a Good Day to Die Hard in 2013.

“Among the many holiday nods — 12 bad guys, wife named Holly, giant teddy bear gift in waiting and endless Christmas decor — there’s also a film score featuring ominous renditions of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy sprinkled with the jingling of sleigh bells,” Chin notes http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/die-hard-christmas-movie-debate-calgary-eyeopener-1.4450305

Mark Hughes, a film and television screenwriter, who has also worked as a media specialist and campaign ad writer. Hughes penned a piece for Forbes magazine on Dec. 14, 2011, where he picked Die Hard as number one on his list of “Top Ten Best Christmas Movies Of All Time,” as the story was headlined.

Wrote Hughes: “Die Hard is everything every Christmas movie should always be forever. It’s a mix of the baddie from The Grinch Who Stole Christmas; the unbeatable hero who shows up to teach everyone a lesson from Miracle On 34th Street; the ghosts of past, present, and future who bring insight and change from A Christmas Carol; plus every redemptive struggle about family and personal evolution and good versus evil, all wrapped up in a big shiny box with a bow made of explosions and bullets. There’s Christmas, and then there’s Christmas with punching terrorists in the face and winning back your entire family – which do YOU prefer? It doesn’t matter what you prefer, actually, because Bruce Willis prefers the latter, and Bruce Willis always wins. You’d know that if you watched the Die Hard movies. So start watching now, beginning with this one….”

While I’ve added Die Hard to my annual Christmas viewing list (at some years), Dickens it ain’t. Charles Dickens, a heterodox Anglican if ever there was one, wrote A Christmas Carol after he journeyed to Lancashire at the age of 31 in the summer of 1843 to see for himself how life was lived in the industrial north of England. On the train back to London, impacted by the poverty and misery he had seen, he conceptualized A Christmas Carol on the eve of revolutions throughout Europe, counselling that hearts must hear and eyes must see for society to change. He began writing the classic Christmas story a week later. He completed the book that fall in six weeks and the book was published on Dec. 19, 1843, the 177th anniversary of which falls on Tuesday. Since the book was published in 1843, Christmas has never been the same.

“A merry Christmas, Bob!” said Scrooge, with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back. “A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you, for many a year! I’ll raise your salary, and endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of Smoking Bishop, Bob!”

Jeanette has a particular fondness for Linus, Charlie Brown, Lucy and Snoopy in A Charlie Brown Christmas, made in 1965 and one of the most successful animated Christmas specials in TV history. Peanuts creator Charles Schulz and animator Bill Melendez wrote the outline in one day, and the musical score was written by jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi. ABC celebrated its 50th anniversary two years ago with a special showing Nov. 30, 2015.

Me, I also like It’s a Wonderful Life, produced and directed by Frank Capra, based on the short story The Greatest Gift, written by Philip Van Doren Stern in 1939.

The film stars Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey, a man who has given up his dreams in order to help others, and whose imminent suicide on Christmas Eve brings about the intervention of his guardian angel, Clarence Odbody (Henry Travers). Clarence shows George all the lives he has touched and how different life in his community of Bedford Falls, New York would be had he never been born. Film historian James Berardinelli has commented on the parallels between It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol, noting that in both stories, a man revisits his life and potential death (or non-existence) with the help of spirits or angels, culminating in a joyous epiphany and a renewed sense of purpose and life.

It’s a Wonderful Life, released in 1946, is one of the most acclaimed films ever made, and was nominated for five Academy Awards including Best Picture, and has been recognized by the American Film Institute as one of the 100 best American films ever made.

Initially, however, it did middling business at the box office and opened to at best mixed reviews.

For their part, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) weighed in on May 26, 1947 with a memo stating: “With regard to the picture It’s a Wonderful Life, [redacted] stated in substance that the film represented rather obvious attempts to discredit bankers by casting Lionel Barrymore as a ‘scrooge-type’ so that he would be the most hated man in the picture. This, according to these sources, is a common trick used by Communists. [In] addition, [redacted] stated that, in his opinion, this picture deliberately maligned the upper class, attempting to show the people who had money were mean and despicable characters.”

In a similar vein to It’s a Wonderful Life, another movie destined to become a  Christmas classic, Miracle on 34th Street, was released a year later in 1947. An old man going by the name of Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn) fills in for an intoxicated Santa in Macy’s annual Thanksgiving Day parade. Kringle proves to be such a hit that he is soon appearing regularly at the chain’s main store in midtown Manhattan.

The Christmas movie genre is a rather big tent one, as we Catholics like to say. Who can forget the electrifying Griswold family of Chicago? National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation is a 1989 Christmas comedy directed by Jeremiah S. Chechik, written by John Hughes, and starring Chevy Chase, Beverly D’Angelo and Randy Quaid, with Juliette Lewis and Johnny Galecki as the Griswold children Audrey and Rusty. It is the third installment in National Lampoon’s Vacation film series.

More perhaps in the Die Hard vein, or at least not in the Frank Capra one, are some other Christmas bad-ass classics, including Canada’s 1974 contribution, the under appreciated genre classic Black Christmas, starring Olivia Hussey, Keir Dullea, Margot Kidder, Andrea Martin, Marian Waldman and John Saxon.

The story follows a group of sorority sisters who are receiving threatening phone calls, while being stalked and murdered during the holiday season by a deranged murderer hiding in the attic of their sorority house.

Inspired by a series of murders that took place in the Westmount section of Montreal, the part urban legend “The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs,” and the true crime unsolved slaying of Janett Christman on the evening of March 18, 1950  in Columbia, Missouri, A. Roy Moore composed the script, which was originally titled Stop Me. Upon American director Bob Clark’s involvement, numerous alterations were made, primarily the shifting to a university setting with young adult characters. Parts of Black Christmas were filmed on the University of Toronto campus.

Nine years later in 1983, Clark would make the light-hearted Christmas classic A Christmas Story, following the adventures of youngster Ralphie Parker (Peter Billingsley), who spends most of his time dodging a bully (Zack Ward) and dreaming of his ideal Christmas gift, a “Red Ryder air rifle.”

The film was shot on an estimated budget of $620,000 in Toronto in the winter of 1973–74. Black Christmas was purchased by Warner Bros., who distributed the film in North America, releasing it in Canada on Oct. 11, 1974.

In the United States, Warner Bros. timed the release with the Christmas holiday, releasing it on Dec. 20, 1974. It screened at theaters in the United States through late 1975, and would internationally gross over $4 million at the box office.

It took some years after its release, but eventually Black Christmas would receive praise from film critics and historians for being one of the earliest films of its type to conclude without revealing the identity of its villain. It has also earned a following as a cult classic. The film is generally considered to be one of the earliest slasher films,  serving as an influence for Halloween four years later in 1978.

And speaking of Christmas slasher films, who can forget the now 1984 Christmas cult classic Silent Night, Deadly Night, directed by Charles E. Sellier Jr., and starring Robert Brian Wilson, Lilyan Chauvin, Gilmer McCormick, Toni Nero, Linnea Quigley, Britt Leach and Leo Geter. Set during Christmas, the story concerns a young man, Billy, who suffers from post-traumatic stress over witnessing his parents’ Christmas Eve murder and his subsequent upbringing in an abusive Catholic orphanage. In adulthood, the Christmas holiday leads him into a psychological breakdown, and he emerges as a spree killer donning a Santa suit.

After negative reviews and something of a public outcry, the film was pulled from theaters a week after its release on Nov. 9, 1984.

Also part of the Christmas movie genre is Bad Santa, made in 2003 and directed by Terry Zwigoff, and starring Billy Bob Thornton, Tony Cox, Lauren Graham, Brett Kelly, Lauren Tom, John Ritter, and Bernie Mac. It was John Ritter’s last live action film appearance before his death on Sept. 11, 2003. The Coen brothers, Ethan and Joel, were the film’s executive producers.

Willie T. Soke (Billy Bob Thornton)and his dwarf assistant Marcus Skidmore (Tony Cox) are professional thieves. Every year, Willie disguises himself as a department store Santa Claus and Marcus disguises himself as an elf in order for both of them to rob shopping malls at night, using Marcus’ wife Lois as their getaway driver and accomplice. Marcus takes his duty as an elf seriously, but Willie is a sex-addicted alcoholic, and is gradually unable to appropriately perform his Santa duties with children, plus his safe-cracking performance is being affected, much to Marcus’ dismay. When they are hired at the Saguaro Square Mall in Phoenix, the vulgar remarks made by Willie shock the prudish mall manager Bob Chipeska, who brings them to the attention of security chief Gin Slagel.

While some Christmas movies have quickly entered the pantheon of yuletide classics to virtual universal acclaim, others become classics more slowly over time, or perhaps as niche classics; Christmas favourites, but not for everyone.

Over the last several years, Christmas with a Capital C, directed by Helmut Schleppi, and shot in February 2010 in Seward in southern Alaska in an inlet on the Kenai Peninsula, has become a favourite for me to watch when the time arrives for Christmas movies.
Hometown Mayor Dan Reed (Ted McGinley) looks forward to each year with enthusiasm to all the events, friends and family that fill this special season in the small fictional town of Trapper Falls, Alaska (Seward).

Together with his brother Greg (Brad Stine), they dedicate time away from their adventure tour company to spread Christmas cheer, including annually putting up a 50-year-old  hand-craved nativity set, given years ago to the town, in the public square.

Probably no need for a spoiler alert even if I tell you Christmas with a Capital C is a Pure Flix Entertainment Christian filmmaking entry in the culture wars and the so-called “War on Christmas” by secularists.  Pure Flix Entertainment is owned by David. A.R. White, raised in a small Mennonite farming town outside of Dodge City, Kansas, brothers Kevin and Bobby Downes, and Michael Scott.

The Christian filmmaking genre, as I wrote in a post headlined “Flying largely under the mainstream cinematic radar: Christian movie genre is ‘hot’” back on Sept. 15, 2014 (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/15/flying-largely-under-the-mainstream-cinematic-radar-christian-movie-genre-is-hot/) regularly gets knocked — and truth be told, not unfairly often — by more “secular moviegoers for its heavy-handed theological scripts, clunky acting and cheesy sets, with mainly bad films, which, to be charitable, do little more than preach to the choir.”

Given that Christmas with a Capital C centers in part  — although it will turn out not to be the main point  — around the United States Constitution’s First Amendment Establishment Clause, which prohibits the government from making any law respecting an establishment of religion and not only forbids the government from establishing an official religion, but also prohibits government actions that unduly favor one religion over another, as well as prohibiting the government from unduly preferring religion over non-religion, or non-religion over religion, it can be a bit clunky going at times. Christmas with a Capital C may hold the distinction of being the first movie of the genre where the words “Establishment Clause” are actually uttered on screen.The plot has Dan’s old high school rival Mitch Bright (Daniel Baldwin), a mean-spirited and embittered militant atheist returning home after 20 years, Dan is immediately suspicious. Mitch is a highly successful big city lawyer who has never wanted anything to do with Trapper Falls.

Their rivalry re-ignites when the frustrated Mitch takes offense to what he sees as the town’s violation of his rights. Mitch wants the nativity scene removed from the front of City Hall and the word Christmas switched to Happy Holidays on all signs. Fifty years of tradition are now challenged not by an outsider but a former member of the community. As the conflict escalates it goes beyond one person’s opinion but magnifies into an entire town problem when Mitch enters into the mayoral race to have Dan replaced.

In the heat of the legal battle and facing certain defeat, Dan’s wife Kristen (Nancy Stafford) and their daughter Makayla (Francesca Derosa) wanting to show, what she believes to be, the true meaning of Christmas are inspired to launch a “Christmas with a Capital C” campaign as an effort to keep the town together. In doing so they discover the secret behind Mitch’s return.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

 

The Accidental Lowbrow Fast Food Blogger

 

 

 

 

Back in September 2014, I’d never have guessed some 80,000 views and 2½ years later, how often I’d have written about food, especially fast food joints and other greasy spoons in Canada and the United States. I’m not quite sure what I thought I was going to be writing about, but I don’t remember food being on my composing radar for blog posts. Premillennial dispensationalism? The Rapture? Young Earth Creationism?  Spiritual Warfare? Petrus Romanus? Prophecy of St. Malachy or Prophecy of the Popes? Any and all things Catholic? Sure, all of these and more, some pretty arcane and from the fringe of the respectable-thinking universe. But food? Who’d a thunk it?

Admittedly, I had written on occasion about food, especially fast food, prior to venturing forth with soundingsjohnbarker (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/) but not that often.  Mainly if it involved a road trip from Southern Ontario to New England or vice-versa that wound up taking me to my favourite Red Barn, up in the Adirondacks in Troy, New York, or something got me thinking about high school back in Oshawa, Ontario and memories of Mother’s Pizza and Pepi’s Pizza. That sort of thing.

Just taking a quick look here, it looks like I’ve become an insatiable lowbrow fast food blogger who dreams of being to blogging what Guy Fieri of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives is to TV. And that’s just looking for headlines that trumpet food, not so much others posts that mention food either in a secondary or passing fashion, overshadowed by a main non-food story. Last year I wrote about Glenview, Illinois-based Family Video (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/01/17/who-shot-the-video-store-and-how-did-glenview-illinois-based-family-video-survive-to-thrive-and-still-rent-movies-and-now-sell-pizza/), which continues to survive and thrive and still rent movies, but also mentioned how they now sell pizza made in their video stores from Marco’s Pizza of Toledo, Ohio. Marco’s Pizza, founded in 1978 by Pasquale “Pat” Giammarco, is one of the fastest-growing pizza franchise operations in the United States. The Toledo-based delivery pizza franchisor opened 116 stores in 2015. Pizza is a $46- billion market in the United States that continues to grow at a rate of about one to two per cent per year.

In a similar vein, I’ve written a couple of times about the Burntwood Curling Club’s monthly, from November to April anyway, fundraising pickerel fish fry, now in its third season, to bring in some revenue at $20 a plate for the older crowd and $10 a plate for those 12 and under, with proceeds going towards what it cost to replace the club’s aging ice plant, a big ticket six-figure item for curling clubs. The last fish fry of the season is set for Monday, April 3 in the upstairs club lounge from 5 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. The fish fry involves club volunteers cooking about 50 pounds per fish fry of  fresh pickerel, also known as walleye, from the commercial fish packing station in Wabowden. Pickerel is the most valuable commercial fish catch in Manitoba, with an average value of  about $20 million per year, which is about 70 per cent of the landed value of all species, and comprise more than 40 per cent of commercial fish production in the province by weight. Am I writing primarily about curling or pickerel? I suppose some of both really, but I know a bit more about pickerel. Jeanette and I are looking forward this spring and summer to marking a decade fishing together off the dock for pickerel at Paint Lake Marina!

I’ve written here and elsewhere about driving a Plymouth Duster to deliver for Mother’s Pizza Simcoe North in Oshawa during my last spring in high school for $2.65 per hour – plus tips (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/15/a-taste-for-yesterday-mothers-pizza-and-pepis-pizza/). Mother’s was an iconic Canadian pizza parlour chain from the 1970s – with its swinging parlour-style doors, Tiffany lamps, antique-style chairs, red-and-white checked gingham tablecloths, black-and-white short silent movies shown on a screen for patrons waiting for their meal to enjoy, root beer floats and pizzas served on silver-coloured metal pedestal stands.

Maybe we all just love food, no?

In Winnipeg, we have V.J.’s Drive Inn at at Broadway and Main with its overstuffed double chili cheese dogs, greasy spoon certified cheeseburgers, golden fries and chocolate milkshakes, all for the more discerning among the Fort Garry Hotel clientele methinks.

And speaking of chili dogs: should you ever find yourself down in Durham, North Carolina, you can’t go wrong enjoying a meal at The Dog House, locally owned and in business in Durham since 1970, and serving up an assortment of Bull-Dogs, Boxer Dogs, Collie Dogs, Hound Dogs, Puppy Dogs, Ol’ Yallows and the like.

Living in North Carolina was where I developed tastes for chili dogs, deep-fried cornmeal-batter Hushpuppies, pork barbecue and fat back, cracklins and wash pot pork rinds, while prudently not losing said tastes by overdoing it with low-density lipoproteins (LDL) cholesterol testing at nearby Duke University Medical Center, although I visited the world-class medical facility for other ailments on occasion.

The Dog House says its chili is made from a family recipe with pure beef, and no beans, soy or other fillers; just a blend of secret spices and 47 years of experience.

As for the slaw, it is “not too sweet and not too spicy,” and always freshly made.

But closer to home, when you’re appetite is a bit larger than a sausage dog or one of its cousins,  my pick is Lovey’s BBQ in St. Boniface for hand trimmed briskets, pork shoulders and ribs. Yum!

Sometimes you get to combine your writing interests, say about Catholicism and food, as I did in “Catholic cooking: From Pope Francis’ love for Buenos Aires pizzerias to Father Leo Patalinghug, the TV show Filipino ‘Cooking Priest’” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/03/15/catholic-cooking-from-pope-francis-love-for-buenos-aires-pizzerias-to-father-leo-patalinghug-the-tv-show-filipino-cooking-priest/)

I combined Catholicism and food on a few other occasions as well: In “‘Make mine halibut, please’: Fish-and-chips-Catholic-on-Friday” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/11/07/make-mine-halibut-please-fish-and-chips-catholic-on-friday/) I wrote that until Blessed Pope Paul VI proclaimed Paenitemini (Apostolic Constitution On Penance) on Feb. 17, 1966, which allowed episcopal conferences to permit Catholics in their jurisdictions to substitute some other penitential practice aside from abstaining from meat on Fridays. Catholics had been eating fish on Friday under an edict in force in the universal church since Pope Saint Nicholas 1, also known as Saint Nicholas the Great, in 851. With the exception in Canada of Ash Wednesday and Good Friday in accordance with the prescriptions of Canon 1253, proclaimed in 1983. Fridays are days of abstinence, but Canadian Catholics can substitute special acts of charity or piety on this day.

No need to feel too sorry though for us fish eaters for having to forgo meat on Fridays from 851 to 1966. We made up for it on an annual basis on “Fat Tuesday,” which fell on Feb. 28 this year. Fat Tuesday. Mardi Gras.  Máirt Inide. Dydd Mawrth Ynyd.  Fastnacht. Fastelavn. Sprengidagur.  Güdisdienstag. Vastlapäev.  Užgavėnės.  Fettisdagen. Laskiainen. Shrove Tuesday. Call it what you will, but we made sure we ate  – and ate big and ate rich – on this moveable feast, based on the lunar cycles of the moon – the last day of Shrovetide before the penitential season of Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, which is its colloquial name.  Dating to the A.D. 900s, the official name is the Day of Ashes. Come to think of it, even though we can eat meat on Fridays now outside of Lent, we remain fond of Shrove Tuesday.

“If smell and sound are important to Catholics, so, too, taste,” I wrote in a blog post headlined “With our O antiphons, Smoking Bishops and ‘sinful servants’ we are the Church Militant on Earth.” I noted that we had borrowed the “Smoking Bishop,” a mulled wine wassail, “in a spirit of ecumenical breaking of bread at table” from our “Anglican or Episcopalian brothers and sisters, particularly Charles Dickens, a heterodox Anglican if ever there was one, who wrote A Christmas Carol after he journeyed to Lancashire in the summer of 1843 to see for himself how life was lived in the industrial north of England. He completed the book that fall in six weeks and the book was published on Dec. 19, 1843 (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/12/18/with-our-o-antiphons-smoking-bishops-and-sinful-servants-we-are-the-church-militant-on-earth/).

“A merry Christmas, Bob!” said Scrooge, with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back. “A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you, for many a year! I’ll raise your salary, and endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of Smoking Bishop, Bob!”

It is in that spirit we offer you this recipe for a Smoking Bishop, courtesy of Cedric Dickens, a great-grandson of Charles Dickens, published in his 1988 book, Drinking with Dickens:

Smoking Bishop

6 Clementines
1/2 C sugar
30 cloves
8 C moderately sweet red wine
1 bottle ruby port

Bake the oranges in a medium oven for about 20 minutes. Stick cloves into the oranges and then put them into a large bowl. Pour the wine over them and add the sugar. Cover and leave in a warm place for 24 hours. Squeeze the juice from the oranges and mix it with the wine. Add the port and heat the mixture in a pan. Do not boil. Serve hot.

And you can be pretty sure that while I might not post about it on soundingsjohnbarker, I’m quite likely to put in a bit of a plug on my Facebook page at least for annual Grilled Cheese Sandwich Day come Wednesday, April 12. I’ve done so for the last two years.

Melting cheese on top of bread is a culinary concept that has been around since the time of Ancient Rome,  but modern grilled cheese sandwiches, as we know them, didn’t become popular until the 1920s. Due to the ready availability of cheese and sliced bread for the average consumer by the early 20th century, they became an American staple, but a connoisseur’s love for grilled cheese sandwiches also spread around the world.

Thanksgiving, of course, gives me a change to give holiday nod to turkey, such as in this piece, “Mouthwatering American Thanksgiving recipes correction in the New York Times and other pardonable acts” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/11/27/mouthwatering-american-thanksgiving-recipes-correction-in-the-new-york-times-and-other-pardonable-acts/):

“Correction: November 26, 2014

“An article last Wednesday recommending a Thanksgiving dish from each state, with a recipe, contained numerous errors.

“The recipe from Connecticut, for quince with cipollini onions and bacon, omitted directions for preparing the quince. It should be peeled, cored and cut into 1-inch chunks. An illustration with the West Virginia recipe, for pawpaw pudding, depicted a papaya — not a pawpaw, which is correctly depicted above. The introduction to the recipe from Arizona, for cranberry sauce and chiles, misstated the origin of Hatch chiles. They are grown in New Mexico, not in Arizona.

“The introduction to the Delaware recipe, for du Pont turkey with truffled zucchini stuffing, referred incorrectly to several historical points about the Winterthur estate. It was an ancestral home of the du Pont family, not the sole one; it was established in 1837, not in 1810; the house was completed in 1839, not in 1837. The introduction also misstated the relationship of Pauline Foster du Pont to Eleuthère Irénée du Pont. Pauline was the wife of Mr. du Pont’s grandson, not his daughter-in-law.

And I wouldn’t be much of a former New Englander, if after enjoying a “blue” rare steak, I didn’t enjoy  scarfing down some super premium ice cream, like Steve’s Ice Cream, named after Steve Herrell, as it was in the early 1980s at the original location on Elm Street in Davis Square in Somerville, Massachusetts, or Ben & Jerry’s Homemade, Inc., which got its its start  in a renovated gas station at the corner of St. Paul and College streets  in Burlington, Vermont. In 1980, they were  showing movies on summer Saturday nights on an outside wall of the gas station, I remember.\

Burgers have been the continuing jackpot for my food entries, however, which may not surprise many. What might surprise you, however, is the relatively big numbers (outpacing anything I’ve written on Thompson city council, can you believe it?) has been for two posts on two defunct American burger chains, both of which also operated for a time in parts of Canada, particularly in the 1970s.

Apparently former employees of the two burger chains and hungry aficionados who remember them fondly, salivate, or so it seems, to a helping of words on the Red Barn and Burger Chef, gone, but never forgotten.

Both stories get read pretty much daily somewhere in the world and “Red Barn, Big Barney and the Barnbuster” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/13/red-barn-big-barney-and-the-barnbuster/) was published here back on Sept. 13, 2014, while “Burger Chef: The story of the greatest might-have-been in the history of the fast food business” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/03/13/burger-chef-the-story-of-the-greatest-might-have-been-in-the-history-of-the-fast-food-business/) appeared originally on March 13, 2016.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘Tis the season for Christmas movie fare from Die Hard to Dickens

Turns out my friend Kevin Lewis, a music and senior band teacher since 2009 at R.D. Parker Collegiate in Thompson, is right after all. When it comes to Christmas movies, Die Hard, made in 1988 and starring Bruce Willis, is the holiday ticket.

I must say when Jeanette first shared Kevin’s Christmas holiday movie classic preference with me three or four years ago – later confirmed to me by Kevin himself – I was a touch surprised. My thinking in the area was a bit more conventional; more along the lines of watching one of the six movie versions of A Christmas Carol made since 1938, or perhaps enjoying Jimmy Stewart, with Lionel Barrymore and Donna Reed, in the 1946 black-and-white movie classic, It’s a Wonderful Life.

Die Hard, directed by John McTiernan and written by Steven E. de Souza and Jeb Stuart, follows the Christmas Eve exploits of John McClane (Bruce Willis), playing an off-duty New York City cop visiting in Los Angeles for the holidays to see his estranged wife, Holly Gennaro McClane (Bonnie Bedelia), and two daughters, as he takes on a group of highly organized criminals, led by Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman), at a holiday party in the L.A. skyscraper that is the American headquarters of the Japanese-owned business Holly works for, as Gruber and his men stage a heist under the guise of a terrorist attack using hostages, including Holly, to keep police at bay.

Die Hard is based on Roderick Thorp’s 1979 novel Nothing Lasts Forever, and was the sequel to 1966’s The Detective, which was adapted into a 1968 film of the same name that starred Frank Sinatra. Willis, not the first choice for the role (Sinatra declined to reprise his role 20 years after The Detective and action star Arnold Schwarzenegger turned the part down) was known primarily as a comedic television actor in 1988, particularly for co-starring as a private detective with Cybill Shepherd in Moonlighting on ABC between March 1985 and May 1989.

Die Hard changed all that and made Willis into an action star. Made for $28 million, Die Hard has grossed more than $140 million theatrically worldwide. The film’s success has spawned four sequels to date: Die Hard 2 in 1990; Die Hard with a Vengeance in 1995; Live Free or Die Hard in 2007 and a Good Day to Die Hard in 2013.

My friend Kevin Lewis’ opinion of Die Hard as primo Christmas fare is shared by Mark Hughes, a film and television screenwriter, who has also worked as a media specialist and campaign ad writer. Hughes penned a piece for Forbes magazine on Dec. 14, 2011, where he picked Die Hard as number one on his list of “Top Ten Best Christmas Movies Of All Time,” as the story was headlined.

Wrote Hughes: “Die Hard is everything every Christmas movie should always be forever. It’s a mix of the baddie from The Grinch Who Stole Christmas; the unbeatable hero who shows up to teach everyone a lesson from Miracle On 34th Street; the ghosts of past, present, and future who bring insight and change from A Christmas Carol; plus every redemptive struggle about family and personal evolution and good versus evil, all wrapped up in a big shiny box with a bow made of explosions and bullets. There’s Christmas, and then there’s Christmas with punching terrorists in the face and winning back your entire family – which do YOU prefer? It doesn’t matter what you prefer, actually, because Bruce Willis prefers the latter, and Bruce Willis always wins. You’d know that if you watched the Die Hard movies. So start watching now, beginning with this one….”

While I’ve added Die Hard to my annual Christmas viewing list (at some years), Dickens it ain’t. Charles Dickens, a heterodox Anglican if ever there was one, wrote A Christmas Carol after he journeyed to Lancashire at the age of 31 in the summer of 1843 to see for himself how life was lived in the industrial north of England. On the train back to London, impacted by the poverty and misery he had seen, he conceptualized A Christmas Carol on the eve of revolutions throughout Europe, counselling that hearts must hear and eyes must see for society to change. He began writing the classic Christmas story a week later. He completed the book that fall in six weeks and the book was published on Dec. 19, 1843, the 172^nd anniversary of which fell last Saturday. Since the book was published in 1843, Christmas has never been the same.

“A merry Christmas, Bob!” said Scrooge, with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back. “A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you, for many a year! I’ll raise your salary, and endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of Smoking Bishop, Bob!”

Jeanette has a particular fondness for Linus, Charlie Brown, Lucy and Snoopy in A Charlie Brown Christmas, made in 1965 and one of the most successful animated Christmas specials in TV history. Peanuts creator Charles Schulz and animator Bill Melendez wrote the outline in one day, and the musical score was written by jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi. ABC celebrated its 50th anniversary with a special showing Nov. 30.

Me, I also like It’s a Wonderful Life, produced and directed by Frank Capra, based on the short story The Greatest Gift, written by Philip Van Doren Stern in 1939.

The film stars Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey, a man who has given up his dreams in order to help others, and whose imminent suicide on Christmas Eve brings about the intervention of his guardian angel, Clarence Odbody (Henry Travers). Clarence shows George all the lives he has touched and how different life in his community of Bedford Falls, New York would be had he never been born. Film historian James Berardinelli has commented on the parallels between It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol, noting that in both stories, a man revisits his life and potential death (or non-existence) with the help of spirits or angels, culminating in a joyous epiphany and a renewed sense of purpose and life.

It’s a Wonderful Life is one of the most acclaimed films ever made, and was nominated for five Academy Awards including Best Picture, and has been recognized by the American Film Institute as one of the 100 best American films ever made.

Initially, however, it did middling business at the box office and opened to at best mixed reviews.

For their part, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) weighed in on May 26, 1947 with a memo stating: “With regard to the picture It’s a Wonderful Life, [redacted] stated in substance that the film represented rather obvious attempts to discredit bankers by casting Lionel Barrymore as a ‘scrooge-type’ so that he would be the most hated man in the picture. This, according to these sources, is a common trick used by Communists. [In] addition, [redacted] stated that, in his opinion, this picture deliberately maligned the upper class, attempting to show the people who had money were mean and despicable characters.”

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

With our O antiphons, Smoking Bishops and ‘sinful servants’ we are the Church Militant on Earth

A week from today we again celebrate Christmas, the second most important date on the Christian liturgical calendar, surpassed only by Easter. On Jan. 9, 2013, I wrote that when I looked around St. Lawrence Roman Catholic Church here in Thompson, Manitoba, part of the largely missionary Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Keewatin-Le Pas, which takes in some 430,000 square kilometres and stretches across the northern parts of three Canadian provinces – Saskatchewan, Manitoba and a small portion of Northwestern Ontario, during the 2012 vigil mass Christmas Eve, and saw Father Guna Sekhar Pothula, robed in his white and gold sacramental vestments, swinging a thurible, a metal censer suspended from chains and holding burning incense – I found the scene comforting and liturgically meaningful in both sight and smell. Too often, we forget that as Catholics we use all our senses in a participatory way in worship.

Take the Great Antiphons, known as the O antiphons, for example, those Magnificat antiphons chanted or recited at Vespers of the Liturgy of the Hours during the last seven days of Advent preparation known as the Octave before Christmas and also heard as the alleluia verses on the same days from Dec. 17 to Dec. 23 inclusive at mass.

They are referred to as the O antiphons because the title of each one begins with the interjection “O”: O Sapientia (O Wisdom); O Adonai (O Ruler of the House of Israel); O Radix Jesse (O Root of Jesse); O Clavis David (O Key of David); O Oriens (O Rising Dawn); O Rex Gentium (O King of the Nations); and O Emmanuel (O God With Us). Taking the first letter of each and reversing the order – Emmanuel, Rex, Oriens, Clavis, Radix, Adonai, Sapientia – gives the Latin words ero cras, which means “tomorrow I will come.”

While the exact origins of the polyphonous O antiphons are now shrouded by the mist of time, they probably date back to the late 5th or 6th early century. At the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Benoit-sur-Loire in France,  also known as the Abbey of Fleury or Abbaye Saint-Benoît de Fleury, one of the oldest Benedictine abbeys in Western Europe, founded in the 6th century, the O antiphons were traditionally recited by the abbot and other abbey leaders in descending rank, and then a gift was given to each member of the community.

The second O antiphon, which is chanted today, is O Adonai (O Ruler of the House of Israel): “O Adonai, and Leader of the house of Israel, Who didst appear to Moses in the flame of the burning bush, and didst give unto him the Law on Sinai: come and with an outstretched arm redeem us.” But while Catholics are indeed People of the Book, we are also people of song and praise, as you can hear here from the Dominican Friars of England & Scotland (English Province) student brothers at Blackfriars, Oxford eight years ago today on Dec. 18 , 2006 on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvafrxZ_Ww4#t=11

If smell and sound are important to Catholics, so, too, taste. Take the “Smoking Bishop,” a mulled wine wassail,  which in a spirit of ecumenical breaking of bread at table, we have borrowed from our Anglican (also known as Episcopalian and Church of England, depending what country you are reading this post in) brothers and sisters, particularly Charles Dickens, a heterodox Anglican if ever there was one, who wrote A Christmas Carol after he journeyed to Lancashire in the summer of 1843 to see for himself how life was lived in the industrial north of England. He completed the book that fall in six weeks and the book was published on Dec. 19, 1843, the 171st anniversary of which falls tomorrow:

“A merry Christmas, Bob!” said Scrooge, with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back. “A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you, for many a year! I’ll raise your salary, and endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of Smoking Bishop, Bob!”

It it is in that spirit we offer you this recipe for a Smoking Bishop, courtesy of Cedric Dickens, a great-grandson of Charles Dickens, published in his 1988 book, Drinking with Dickens:

Smoking Bishop

6 Clementines
1/2 C sugar
30 cloves
8 C moderately sweet red wine
1 bottle ruby port

Bake the oranges in a medium oven for about 20 minutes. Stick cloves into the oranges and then put them into a large bowl. Pour the wine over them and add the sugar. Cover and leave in a warm place for 24 hours. Squeeze the juice from the oranges and mix it with the wine. Add the port and heat the mixture in a pan. Do not boil. Serve hot.

We Catholics also share a collective memory and remember our saints and martyrs in Eucharistic Prayer 1, an essential of the rubrics comprising the Roman Canon or Missal, with origins that reach as far back as the 4th century, and which made an indelible mark on my Catholic boyhood, although it doesn’t have quite the same resonance for most of my Protestant friends, I’ve found.

“In union with the whole Church we honour Mary, the ever-virgin mother of Jesus Christ our Lord and God. We honour Joseph, her husband, the apostles and martyrs Peter and Paul, Andrew, James, John, Thomas, James, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Simon and Jude; we honour Linus, Cletus, Clement, Sixtus, Cornelius, Cyprian, Lawrence, Chrysogonus, John and Paul, Cosmas and Damian and all the saints. May their merits and prayers gain us your constant help and protection … to us, also, your sinful servants, who hope in your abundant mercies, graciously grant some share and fellowship with your holy apostles and martyrs: with John the Baptist, Stephen, Matthias, Barnabas, Ignatius, Alexander, Marcellinus, Peter, Felicity, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia, Anastasia and all your saints: admit us, we beg you, into their company, not weighing our merits, but granting us your pardon….”

Every pope from Peter up to and including Sixtus II, beheaded Aug. 6, 258 under the edict of Roman Emperor Valerian, was a saint and martyr, including Linus, Anacletus (Cletus), Clement I, Evaristus, Alexander I, Sixtus I (also called Xystus I), Telesphorus, Hyginus, Pius I, Anicetus, Soter, Eleutherius, Victor I, Zephyrinus, Callistus I, Urban I, Pontain, Anterus, Fabian, Cornelius, Lucius I and Stephen I. Sixtus II was the 24th pope.

When it comes right down to essentials, Catholics pray for deliverance at Christmas and the remainder of the liturgical year through a series of petitions and pleas for intercession, not so unlike many of our Protestant, and for that matter, non-Christian friends, from myriad faith communities. We just like to do it as part and parcel of a history lesson.

As Pope John XXIII, said in Ad Petri Cathedram (“To the Chair of Peter”), his first encyclical, promulgated June 29, 1959, “…the common saying, expressed in various ways and attributed to various authors [including Marco Antonio de Dominis, a 17th century archbishop of Spalato, Peter Meiderlin (Rupertus Meldeniu), a 17th century German Lutheran theologian, or even St. Augustine of Hippo in the 4th century] must be recalled with approval: in essentials, unity; in doubtful matters, liberty; in all things, charity.”

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

EWTN: The late 19th century English Catholic poet Francis Thompson and The Hound of Heaven

Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) routinely offers intelligent television viewing, employing the best in Catholic faith and reason. But sometimes it offers something truly extraordinary such as its Oct. 16 special telling the story of the late and now largely forgotten 19th century English Catholic poet Francis Thompson and his famous 1893 poem, “The Hound of Heaven,” published in his first volume of poems.

Anyone who knows even a little about Joseph Pearce’s life story, a journey that has taken him from the far right British racialism of his youth, with more than a tinge of fascism 35 years ago, to his conversion to Roman Catholicism as a Chestertonian Catholic, and his life in America today as the director of the Center for Faith and Culture at Aquinas College in Nashville, Tennessee, might well appreciate the fact that it is he narrating Francis Thompson’s story. Two Brits, two talented writers and two outsiders on the margins of the British society of their respective historical eras for more than a few years.

Thompson, a cradle Catholic from Preston in Lancashire, was rescued from the streets of London, where he lived under a bridge and was seemingly hopelessly addicted to laudanum – a then commonly available non-prescription, non-controlled tincture of opium containing about 10 per cent powdered opium by weight, the equivalent of one per cent morphine, which could be purchased from the local pharmacist – by Wilfrid Meynell, a Quaker convert to Roman Catholicism, and editor of the literary journal Merry England, who was impressed with his submission entitled “The Passion of Mary.”

Thompson, however, living largely in his own head, in a narcotic-induced dream and nightmare world, coping and surviving as best he could the hell of his real existence, had not expected Meynell to be impressed. He had no expectations really and no gauge to judge by. The 28-year-old Thompson had written to Meynell on Feb. 23, 1887:

“Dear Sir, In enclosing the accompanying article for your inspection, I must ask pardon for the soiled state of the manuscript. It is due, not to slovenliness, but to the strange places and circumstances under which it has been written. For me, no less than Parolles, the dirty nurse experience has something fouled. I enclose stamped envelope for a reply, since I do not desire the return of the manuscript, regarding your judgment of its worthlessness as quite final. I can hardly expect that where my prose fails my verse will succeed. Nevertheless, on the principle of ‘Yet will I try the last,’ I have added a few specimens of it, with the off chance that one may be less poor than the rest. Apologizing very sincerely for any intrusion on your valuable time, I remain yours with little hope,

Francis Thompson

“Kindly address your rejection to the Charing Cross Post Office.” 

The two eventually met in person on the common ground of mutual respect and at Meynell’s instigation and in a singular act of charity, Thompson recovered much of his health at Our Lady of England Priory in Storrington in West Sussex, home to a Community of Canons Regular of Prémontré, also known as Norbertines after Norbert of Xanten, the founder of the order.

After he recovered his health and wrote his greatest poetry over the next decade and a half, Thompson succumbed to tuberculosis and died on Nov. 13, 1907, in the Hospital of St. John and St. Elizabeth in London, at the age of 47.  He is  buried in St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Cemetery at Kensal Green in London.

On the death of Thompson, G.K. Chesterton wrote in his September 1915 essay,  “A Dead Poet” that, “With Francis Thompson we lose the greatest poetic energy since Browning. His energy was of somewhat the same kind. Browning was intellectually intricate because he was morally simple. He was too simple to explain himself; he was too humble to suppose that other people needed any explanation. But his real energy, and the real energy of Francis Thompson, was best expressed in the fact that both poets were at once fond of immensity and also fond of detail. Any common Imperialist can have large ideas so long as he is not called upon to have small ideas also. Any common scientific philosopher can have small ideas so long as he is not called upon to have large ideas as well. But great poets use the telescope and also the microscope”

A five-minute Vimeo trailer on the “The Hound of Heaven” 30-minute documentary aired by EWTN Oct. 16 was made last year by Oculus Studios of Lexington, Kentucky and can be found at

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22