It’s 2 a.m. and we’re snoozing into Sunday’s Central Standard Time (CST) in Manitoba

Provincial governments come and go in Manitoba, like elsewhere, but one of things that doesn’t change is my email reminder around this time every year: “Manitoba Municipal and Northern Relations reminds all Manitobans that daylight time will end in Manitoba early Sunday morning when clocks will be set back one hour,” the new NDP government’s Manitoba Municipal and Northern Relations department, presided over by Minister Ian Bushie, cheerily told me yesterday.

“Under the Official Time Act, daylight time ends on the first Sunday in November and resumes the second Sunday in March.

“The official time change back to central standard time will occur this year at 2 a.m., Sunday, Nov. 5 at which time clocks should be set back to 1 a.m.”

So at 2 a.m. in the morrow, we’re snoozing into Sunday’s Central Standard Time, (CST) in Manitoba, with our gratitude renewed for Scottish-born Canadian surveyor, engineer and inventor Sir Sandford Fleming, who we thank profusely for the extra hour of sleep.

While it has been gradually getting darker earlier in the evening since late June here in the Northern Hemisphere, the fact many of us, at least until tomorrow, can still travel home in waning daylight from work or school in the late afternoon in early November is in itself a credit to George Vernon Hudson, an English-born New Zealand amateur entomologist and astronomer who gave the world Daylight Saving Time (DST), a decade or so after Fleming’s development of Standard Time.

Hudson’s day (and sometimes night) job was as a clerk (eventually chief clerk) in the post office in the capital of Wellington on North Island. Hudson’s shift-work job gave him enough leisure time to collect insects, and led him to value after-work hours of daylight for that pursuit when he was working days. On Oct.15, 1895, spring in New Zealand, he presented a paper called “On Seasonal Time-adjustment in Countries South of Lat. 30°”  to the Wellington Philosophical Society, proposing a two-hour daylight-saving shift, and after considerable interest was expressed in Christchurch on South Island, where 1,000 copies of his paper were printed in 1896, he followed up on Oct. 8, 1898 with a second paper, “On Seasonal Time,” also presented to the  Wellington Philosophical Society in springtime, and which can be found in the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, housed at the National Library of New Zealand in Wellington.

It is Fleming, however, who deserves most of the credit for both the international dateline, and standard time zones, conveniently divided into hourly segments, dating back to October 1884 and the International Prime Meridian Conference attended by 25 nations in Washington, D.C. Before Fleming invented standard time, noon in Kingston, Ontario was 12 minutes later than noon in Montréal and 13 minutes before noon in Toronto. Noon local time was the time when the sun stood exactly overhead. As for the international date line, it is an imaginary line at the 180º line of longitude that runs from the South Pole to the North Pole separating two consecutive calendar days.

It was Hipparchus of Nicea, a Greek mathematician and astronomer, who around 150 BCE, proposed a global grid of longitude and latitude lines to measure position. It was a coordinate system for locating points on the surface of a sphere. The vertical axis measured “latitude,” and the horizontal axis “longitude.”

Immediately to the left of the international date line the date in the Eastern Hemisphere is always one day ahead of the date (or day) immediately to the right of the international date line in the Western Hemisphere. There is no regulatory body or agency that can say “yes” or “no” if a country wants to switch sides. The country simply lets the international community and mapmakers know. It is not a perfectly straight line, however, and has been moved slightly over the years to accommodate needs of varied countries in the Pacific Ocean. The Midway Islands are in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) -11, and the Marshall Islands are in UTC+12. The two group of islands, on different sides of the international date line, share the same day and date for the last hour of the day. Samoa, which happens to sit in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, just 32 kilometres, or 20 miles, east of the international date line, went directly from Thursday – on Dec. 29, 2011 – to Saturday, Dec. 31 – without a Friday, Dec. 30. Talk about being anxious to party on New Year’s Eve!

Kiribati, north of Samoa and near the equator, south of Hawaii, previously straddled the dateline. The eastern part of Kiribati was a whole day and two hours behind the western part of the country where its capital is located and a time difference of 23 hours between neighbouring islands. There were nine islands on the eastern side of the international date line, and 20 per cent of the population. On Jan. 1, 1995 it added an eastward extension to its section of the dateline so all 33 of its islands would have the same date and all of Kiribati would be in the Eastern Hemisphere.

Since 1892, when Samoa had two Monday, July 4ths, it had been east of the international date line until Dec. 29, 2011, after switching sides to coincide its days better with trading partners in the United States and Europe. Now, Samoa does a lot more business with New Zealand, Australia, China and Pacific Rim countries such as Singapore, so it switched back to the western side of the international date line.

After missing a train in 1876 in Ireland because its printed schedule listed p.m. instead of a.m., Fleming proposed a single 24-hour clock for the entire world with 24 time zones and within each zone the clocks would indicate the same time, with a one-hour difference between adjoining zones. Usually, when one travels in an easterly direction, a different time zone is crossed every 15 degrees of longitude, which is equal to one hour in time. Usually. China, however, has just one time zone, which makes the time zone uncommonly wide. In the extreme western part of China the sun is at its highest point at 3 p.m. and in the extreme eastern part at 11 a.m. In 1912, the year after the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, the Republic of China had created five time zones in the country, ranging from five and a half to eight and a half hours past Greenwich Mean Time. But in 1949, as the Communist Party consolidated control of the country, Chairman Mao Zedong ordered that all of China use Beijing time.

Fleming was born on Jan. 7, 1827 in the town of Kirkcaldy in the lieutenancy area of Fife on the east coast of Scotland. He emigrated to Canada in 1845, settling in Peterborough in southeastern Ontario.

This year, as we shift back to Standard Time from Daylight Saving Time at 2 a.m. tomorrow, which means an extra hour of slumber for many, but also causes me to ponder the potential complications of moving the clock back an hour and repeating the hour from 1 a.m. to 2 a.m. What happens when the clock jumps backward at 2 a.m. again to 1 a.m. for the second time that night and then repeats the hour? Would you have official log chronologies showing 1:13 a.m., 1:37 a.m., 1:56 a.m., 1:03 a.m. and 1:12 a.m. with the later two actually coming after the first three because they came after the clock fell back an hour? How would you distinguish which came first if need be, if someone needed to inspect the log months later (add the annotation 1:13 a.m. CDT or 1:03 a.m. CST?)

Most of Canada’s time experts work in a place called Building M-36 (which involuntarily conjures up for me visions of the X-Files and Area 51.) They work in the Frequency and Time program in the Measurement Science and Standards portfolio with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) on Montreal Road in Ottawa. Physicist Rob Douglas, the principal research officer, however, can be found on Saskatchewan Drive in Edmonton.

Douglas explained to me years ago that “in a handwritten log the hour of ambiguity to which you refer can be simply resolved by appending the time zone (e.g. CST or CDT) to potentially ambiguous entries … e.g. “01:32 CDT” for the first pass through the hour of ambiguity and “1:32 CST” during the second pass.

“By explicitly writing the time zone as part of the time entry,” Douglas added, “you also bypass the time acts’ defaults for official time – as you might wish to do if you are making agreements across a time zone boundary where there is the possibility of geographic ambiguity of time zone.

“The above procedure is very clear in Canada, but unfortunately less so in the USA,” said Douglas. “We in Canada can refer to ‘official’ or ‘legal’ time, which can alternate between being a ‘Standard Time’ or being a ‘Daylight Time.’ In the USA, to allow regulation by the federal government, both ‘Standard Time’ and ‘Daylight Time’ must be considered a ‘standard’ to avoid having time changes be a state responsibility under the residual powers clause of their constitution. If you think you may have to deal with the American ambiguity, it may be worthwhile to include an explanatory note in the log, such as ‘CST is defined as UTC-6h, and CDT is defined as UTC-5h.’

“If the times are being logged in a permanent logbook, with entries in chronological order for a fixed reckoning of time (i.e. in the absence of clock adjustments), then a simple way of removing the ambiguity is to include in the appropriate place in the log an entry such as “02:00 CDT – log’s clock changed from CDT to CST – 01:00 CST.

“If the log is a computer log, by using the operating system’s timestamps (for example as the time recorded for a file’s modification) the problem disappears since these timestamps are recorded as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC – the modern version of Greenwich Mean Time) which is never subjected to Standard/Daylight changes. The operating system re-interprets these timestamps into its version of the correct local time in effect for the particular UTC timestamp, and this re-interpretation may unfortunately still be expressed ambiguously, but the underlying UTC timestamp can be used to resolve any ambiguity about time zones and Daylight/Standard time.”

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A New England Thanksgiving: Midday Detroit Lions NFL football and a Star Market turkey from Porter Square

Most of my Thanksgiving celebrations have been in Canada, but twice in the 1980s I found myself living in the United States for Thanksgiving on Thursdays. I was living in West Somerville, Massachusetts (home of the now gone but never forgotten legendary Steve’s Ice Cream, started by Steve Herrell on Elm Street in Davis Square, where the ice cream was hand-stirred in the front window in a Nashua, New Hampshire-made four-and-a-half gallon Triple Motion dasher White Mountain rock-salt and ice freezer) in 1980, and in 1989, in East Durham, North Carolina.

Midday meant the traditional Thanksgiving Thursday Detroit Lions NFL football game classic. The Detroit Heralds started the tradition in 1917 when they played against the Canton Bulldogs in a 7-0 loss. The Heralds played again in 1920. then the short-lived Detroit Tigers football team played the Chicago Staleys in 1921. The Detroit Panthers played in 1925 and 1926, and the Detroit Wolverines played in 1928. Thanksgiving football in Detroit has been happening for more than a century. Detroit held its first such matchup against the Chicago Bears in 1934 and has played on the holiday every year since 1945. 

In the 1980 game, the Chicago Bears beat the Detroit Lions 23-17.

My New England turkey came from Star Market in Porter Square, I believe, in adjacent Cambridge, although the exact geography is a bit fuzzy after 42 years, while I believe Food Lion was my likely turkey supplier of choice in North Carolina at the other end of the decade in 1989. In New England, Star Market was something of a grocery story chain legend (New England has a lot legends). Started by Stephen P. Mugar in 1915, Star Market by 1980 was owned by Jewel-Osco, another supermarket chain headquartered in Itasca, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. The Star Market I shopped at in Cambridge, I believe, was in a kind of redlined area for grocery stores, so neighbourhood supermarkets were few and far between.

Food Lion for its part had begun in 1957 as a one-store operation in Salisbury, North Carolina, under the name Food Town and was founded by Ralph W. Ketner.

Originally, the Pilgrim Puritans of Massachusetts Bay Colony celebrated their first Thanksgiving Day on July 8, 1629. The following year, John Winthrop gave his famous sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” where he rightly predicted the colony would be metaphorically, as from salt and light in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, as recorded in the Gospel of Matthew, known as the “city on a hill, ” watched by the world.

“For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill,” Winthrop said. “The eyes of all people are upon us … we must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body.”

Almost four centuries later, their purposes perhaps not quite as lofty, Americans now celebrate Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November. It is the single-biggest domestic travel weekend of the year for Americans going home, wherever that might be, to visit family. While technically speaking, American Thanksgiving is a one-day holiday, like here in Canada, except on a Thursday instead of a Monday, for all intents and purposes it is part of a very long weekend (officially the Wednesday and Friday are not holidays in the United States, just the Thursday, but virtually no one – aside from unfortunate retail store clerks – works the Friday, as those of us who have lived there know.) Just try and get a government official on the telephone after mid-afternoon Wednesday, or all day Friday of American Thanksgiving week if you wish to test this hypothesis.

While the fourth Thursday in November is also often the last Thursday as well (as it is this year), even a cursory glance through the years of our Gregorian calendar reveal some years, of course, have five Thursdays. Such was the case in 1939, the last year of the Great Depression, when Thanksgiving was scheduled to fall on Nov. 30, not only on the fifth Thursday of November but the very last day of November as well in fact, and less than a month before Christmas, causing President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, to use the moral authority of his office by proclamation to move Thanksgiving up a week to Nov. 23 at the initiative of Lew Hahn, general manager of the Retail Dry Goods Association, who had warned U.S. Secretary of Commerce Harry Hopkins as early as August that the late calendar date of Thanksgiving that year could have an adverse effect on retail sales, and that an earlier Thanksgiving could perhaps boost the bottom line.

To understand the rationale more fully, harken back to that bygone era where it was quaintly considered bad form for retailers to display Christmas decorations or have Christmas sales before the celebration of Thanksgiving, as opposed to the current day-after Halloween kick-off. Or is it the day after Labor Day now Christmas sales start? One of the two methinks.

Roosevelt, however, had waited until Oct. 31 to announce his thinking on the matter of moving up Thanksgiving by a week 23 days later. The short-notice change in dates affected the holiday plans of millions of Americans; while there was plenty of confusion and many were inconvenienced, others hit pay dirt.

On the downside, many college football teams traditionally ended their seasons with games against their main rivals on Thanksgiving, and had scheduled them in 1939 for Nov. 30. Some athletic conferences had rules permitting games only through the Saturday following Thanksgiving. Changing the date could mean many teams would play their season finale in empty stadiums or not at all. The change also reportedly caused problems for college registrars, schedulers and calendar makers.

The Thanksgiving winners in 1939 lived in Colorado, Mississippi and Texas. Those three states observed two Thanksgiving holidays that year; the just-proposed Thursday, Nov. 23, and then they did it all over again a week later on the originally scheduled holiday on Thursday, Nov. 30.

Now, that’s something to express gratitude for, unless your were a turkey taking a double-hit on your numbers possibly in  Colorado, Mississippi and Texas. All told, 23 states and the District of Columbia, of the 48 states in those pre-statehood days for Alaska and Hawaii (both joined the union 20 years later in 1959), recognized Nov. 23 as Thanksgiving in 1939, while 22 states stuck with the original Nov. 30 date as planned.

Gradually, the fourth Thursday in November as Thanksgiving, with some see-sawing back-and-forth and general waffling, took a more permanent hold throughout the United States. Texas was the last state to change its holiday law, observing the last Thursday in November as Thanksgiving when there are five Thursdays in the month for the final time on Thursday, Nov. 29, 1956.

The considerable, and for a time in the early 1940s, still ongoing confusion surrounding when Thanksgiving should be celebrated was not surprisingly diffused in the popular culture as ripe material for laughs through cinema, as well as radio. “In the 1940 Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies cartoon Holiday Highlights, directed by Tex Avery,” Wikipedia notes, “the introduction to a segment about Thanksgiving shows the holiday falling on two different dates, one ‘for Democrats’ and one a week later ‘for Republicans.’”

In the 1942 musical Holiday Inn, starring Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, a classic black-and-white film, which I borrowed in DVD format from the Thompson Public Library a few years ago, there is a delightful parody where a November calendar appears on which an animated turkey jumps back and forth between the two weeks, until he gives up and shrugs his shoulders at the audience.

And speaking of turkeys getting the last laugh, no discussion of American Thanksgiving is complete, of course, without addressing the issue of the Presidential turkey pardon.

President Joe Biden pardoned two turkeys, Chocolate and Chip, on Monday as he discharged the presidential duty of the annual Thanksgiving turkey pardon.

“The votes are in, they’ve been counted and verified, no ballot stuffing, no fowl play. The only red wave this season is going to be if German Shepherd Commander knocks over the cranberry sauce,” Biden told an audience on the White House South Lawn.

President Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 clemency to a turkey recorded in an 1865 dispatch by White House reporter Noah Brooks was the origin for the pardoning ceremony, according to the White House Historical Association, a private, nonprofit organization founded in 1961 by First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy with a mission to protect, preserve, and provide public access to the rich history of America’s Executive Mansion.

Reports of turkeys as gifts to American presidents can be traced to the 1870s, when Rhode Island poultry dealer Horace Vose began sending well fed birds to the White House. The First Families did not always feast upon Vose’s turkeys, but the yearly offering gained his farm widespread publicity and became a veritable institution at the White House. At Thanksgiving 1913, a turkey-come-lately from Kentucky shared a few minutes of fame with the fine-feathered Rhode Islander. Soon after, in December, Horace Vose died, thus ending an era.

By 1914, the opportunity to give a turkey to a president was open to everyone, and poultry gifts were frequently touched with patriotism, partisanship, and glee. In 1921, an American Legion post furnished bunting for the crate of a gobbler en route from Mississippi to Washington, while a Harding Girls Club in Chicago outfitted a turkey as a flying ace, complete with goggles. First Lady Grace Coolidge accepted a turkey from a Vermont Girl Scout in 1925. The turkey gifts had become established as a national symbol of good cheer.

With animal rights activists picketing nearby, President George H.W. Bush quipped “‘Reprieve,’ ‘keep him going,’ or ‘pardon’: it’s all the same for the turkey, as long as he doesn’t end up on the president’s holiday table.”

Recently, White House mythmakers have claimed that President Harry S. Truman began the tradition of “pardoning” a turkey. However, the Truman Library & Museum disputes the notion that he was the first to do so. The focus on Truman stems from his being the first president to receive a turkey from the Poultry and Egg National Board and the National Turkey Federation. From September to November 1947, announcements of the government encouraging “poultryless Thursdays” grabbed national headlines. Outrage from homemakers, restaurant owners, and the poultry industry was palpable in Washington. This came to a head when the poultry industry pointed out that the upcoming Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day, the three big turkey holidays, happened to fall on Thursday. The effort was deflated in time for Thanksgiving, but not before poultry growers had sent crates of live chickens— “Hens for Harry”— to the White House in protest. The turkey they presented to President Truman that December promoted the poultry industry and established an annual news niche that endures today.

While 1947 was the beginning of the official turkey presentation from the poultry industry, the turkey pardon remained a sporadic tradition. In December 1948, Truman accepted two turkeys and remarked that they would “come in handy” for Christmas dinner. There was clearly no plan for these birds to receive a presidential pardon. The Washington Post used both “pardon” and “reprieve” in a 1963 article in which President Kennedy said of the turkey, “Let’s keep him going.” During the latter years of the Nixon presidency, Patricia Nixon accepted the turkeys on behalf of the President and in 1973 sent the bird to the Oxon Hill Children’s Farm.

A piece called “Why presidents pardon turkeys — a history” by Domenico Montanaro, PBS Newshour in November 2014 also offered a comprehensive history of the practice, which you can read at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/presidents-pardon-turkeys-history/#.VHbAtv1lVLA.facebook

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Life in the Circumpolar North: Winter living with a sense of joie de vivre and koselig

Monday, Monday. Winter is set to arrive here in Northern Manitoba on winter solstice, Monday, Dec. 21 at 10:49 p.m. Central Standard Time (CST) – which is just eight minutes shy of seven hours after sunset at 3:57 p.m. that day.

The term solstice comes from the Latin word solstitium, meaning “the sun stands still.” This is because on this day, the sun reaches its southern-most position as seen from the Earth. The sun seems to stand still at the Tropic of Capricorn and then reverses its direction. It’s also known as the day the Sun turns around, and in the Northern Hemisphere, astronomers and scientists use the winter solstice Dec. 21 to mark the start of winter season, which ends with the spring equinox Saturday, March 19 at 11:31 p.m. Central Daylight Time (CDT).

Here in Thompson at 55.7433° N latitude, no matter what the official dates for the winter solstice and spring equinox may be, we know quite literally in our bones that we have really long, cold winters and on average there are about 140 frost-free days each year. New arrivals to Thompson and environs are sometimes surprised their first year here to learn Feb. 2 (Groundhog Day), the day when those furry prognosticators – Punxsutawney Phil in Gobbler’s Knob, Pennsylvania, Shubenacadie Sam in Nova Scotia and Wiarton Willie in Ontario – predict either four or six more weeks of winter, depending on whether they see their shadows when they emerge from their burrows, really doesn’t have any resonance beyond wishful thinking here. Winter ending in early or late March in Thompson? Six more weeks of winter only from Feb. 2? Yes, bring it on.

As Thompson oldtimers sometimes tell newcomers: “You might want to consider making friends with winter since it lasts about eight months of the year here.” A slight – but not great – exaggeration. Having spent most of the 21st century living to date in Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories and Thompson in Manitoba, which Macleans magazine, using  Environment Canada, dated, ranked respectively as being number one and number two on their list of “The 10 coldest cities in Canada,” I have some notion of what it means to live in the North.

The North can be defined several ways. Quite often it is quite simply referred to as just that – the North. There is also the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, consisting of 94 major islands and 36,469 minor islands, which aside from Greenland that is almost entirely ice covered, forms the world’s largest High Arctic land area. There is also the Circumpolar North.

The idea of a Circumpolar North was something that caught my imagination in 2001 after I moved from Halifax in Nova Scotia to Yellowknife in Canada’s Northwest Territories. While the Arctic Circle, which I’ve crossed en route to places in the Mackenzie Delta, including the historically-Gwich’in founded community of Tetlit’Zheh (Fort McPherson) at 67.4353° N, Inuvik at 68.3617° and Tuktoyaktuk at 69.4428° N, is rather clearly defined as a circle of latitude that runs 66°33′45.9 N north of the equator, marking the southernmost latitude where the sun can stay continuously below or above the horizon for 24 hours – phenomena known as the Midnight Sun in summer and Polar Night in the depths of a deep and dark December, the Circumpolar North is partly a land of the imagination and a state of being, not quite so precisely defined by geographic lines of latitude, although it generally includes in Canada all that is North of 60, including the islands of the High Arctic, and the remainder of the Yukon, Northwest and Nunavut territories, plus those parts of northeastern Quebec and central Labrador settled by the Innu.

In the United States, the Circumpolar North is defined to include Alaska, except for the Southeast Alaska Panhandle. The Circumpolar North also is made up of Denmark, including Greenland, and the Faroe Islands; Iceland; Norway, including the archipelago of Svalbard; Sweden; Finland; the European Arctic south to the Arctic Circle; and the Russian Federation south to 63°N in European Russia and to 57° N in Asia, including all of the Kamchatka peninsula and Sakhalin Island.

Copenhagen at 55.6761° N is incredibly close latitudinally to Thompson, Manitoba at 55.7433° N, but neither are quite part of the Circumpolar North geographically. But imaginatively, one might make the argument. In winter, Northern Manitoba is vast land of isolation, ice roads, early sunsets and late sunrises. Copenhagen is not so different with short days during the winter with sunrise coming around 9:30 a.m. and sunset about 4:30 p.m.

One December day in 2001, living within sight of the western shore of Great Slave Lake in Yellowknife, I got a sense of how imaginatively the lives of the peoples of the Circumpolar North are weaved together, between glances out my balcony window before 3 p.m. darkness fell and watching Smilla’s Sense of Snow, the delightful 1997 Danish thriller starring Julia Ormond, Gabriel Byrne, and Richard Harris, based on the 1992 novel Frøken Smillas fornemmelse by Danish author Peter Høeg, with both the book and the film telling the story of a transplanted Greenlander, Smilla Jasperson, who investigates the mysterious death of a small Inuit boy who lived in her housing complex in Copenhagen. Clues send her not just around Copenhagen, including the Hotel d’Angleterre, but also to Kiruna, the northernmost town in Sweden in Lapland, and Ilulissat in western Greenland.

And while American poet T.S. Eliot told us that “April is the cruelest month” when he wrote The Waste Land, he seems to have been silent on the issue of November, which the Meteorological Service of Canada at Environment Canada in Winnipeg assures is still usually the snowiest month of the year with one average 35.4 centimetres of snow. At least on average. Usually.

When it comes to permafrost, there was no evidence of the existence of it here in Thompson until work started on the townsite in 1957. Then there was plenty of evidence, as permafrost was encountered at many locations in “scattered islands underlying somewhat less than 50 per cent of the townsite,” as noted by Robert M. Hardy, originally from Winnipeg, and co-founder of R.M. Hardy and Associates Ltd. in Edmonton, the only engineering firm in Alberta to offer geotechnical services at the time, and K.S. Goodman, manager of K.S. Goodman, Materials Testing Laboratories Ltd. in Calgary, in their paper “Permafrost Occurrence and Associated Problems at Thompson, Manitoba.”

Hardy and Goodman’s paper was presented at the National Research Council of Canada’s Associate Committee on Soil and Snow Mechanics Proceedings of the First Canadian Conference on Permafrost in Ottawa on April 17-18, 1962.

We are roughly 240 kilometres south of the line, which approximates the southern limit of continuous permafrost, as shown in the Climatological Atlas of Canada, and about 80 kilometres north of the southern limit of permafrost. But global warming may be causing the southern limit of permafrost to shift further north, meaning less permafrost here in Thompson, making some additional homebuilding on Wekusko Street, Arctic Drive and Char Bay, considered inadvisable 20 years ago, finally feasible within the last six or seven years.

How about the “average weather” for Thompson? Over the course of a year, the temperature typically varies from -29°C to 23°C and is rarely below -39°C or above 28°C. Remember, we’re talking averages now, not temperatures for a specific winter.

The “warm season” (again, a relative term) lasts from May 24 to Sept. 11 with an average daily high temperature above 15°C. The hottest day of the year is on average July 20, with an average high of 23°C and low of 10°C. The coldest day of the year on average is Jan. 15, with an average low of -29°C and high of -19°C

James Diebel, an American, and Jacob Norda, a Swede, who both live in the San Francisco Bay area, can be thanked for these fascinating Thompson weather facts available through their WeatherSpark website at: http://weatherspark.com/averages/28377/Thompson-Manitoba-Canada. Diebel, born and raised in Wisconsin, who has a bachelor’s degree in engineering mechanics and astronautics, and mathematics from University of Wisconsin, and a PhD in aeronautics and astronautics from Stanford University, and Norda, born and raised in Sweden, who holds a master’s degree in electrical engineering and applied physics from Linköping Institute of Technology, teamed up and started Vector Magic, now known as Cedar Lake Ventures, Inc., in December 2007. The weather facts are based on historical records from 1988 to 2012.

How best to live in the Circumpolar North or the North, however, one wishes to define it? With a sense of joie de vivre – joy of living, I think.

Oulu in Finland, which at 65.0167° N is about 1,600 kilometres farther north than Thompson and located just 200 kilometres below the Arctic Circle, is the sixth largest city in Finland with 141,000 residents, and played host to the first-ever two-day international Winter Cycling Congress in 2013. The second congress was in Winnipeg in February 2014.

I remember back in February 2011 reading about Bruce Krentz’s bet with Harold Smith, a former City of Thompson councillor and executive director for Manitoba Housing and Community Development’s northern housing operations, who challenged him to use active transportation commensurate with getting to his new job as health promotion co-ordinator with the Burntwood Regional Health Authority (now the Northern Regional Health Authority). “He said, ‘Really, you should walk the walk,’” Krentz said at the time. “I sort of made the commitment that I would bike all year.” Smith said he didn’t expect Krentz to use a bike as his method of transportation. “To be honest, when I threw down that challenge I was really thinking about him walking, not cycling,” said Smith, who noted in 2011 he wasn’t surprised that Krentz had stuck with the plan. “Bruce has a history of sticking with things, especially the crazier ones.”

That’s interesting, I thought. Sounds like Bruce. And Harold. Frankly, it didn’t hold any appeal to me personally, although I had been doing a good deal of fair weather riding from mid-April through early November since my arrival in Thompson in 2007.

Circumstances, however, can change and so last year when my circumstances changed, I changed my mind about winter biking in Thompson. Which is why you might spot me wearing my trademark-like red helmet, white front and rear red MEC lights flashing, courtesy of Jeanette, as I at first carefully nudge my way over the short city-owned public footpath connecting the 200-block of Juniper Drive to the back of Southwood Shopping Plaza on Thompson Drive South, before reaching the paved two-lane multi-use boulevard pathway for pedestrians and cyclists that delivers me to work at the Thompson campus library of the University College of the North (UCN).

The Norwegians, Circumpolar North residents that they are, have something to teach us, too.

Laura Vanderkam, in a Nov. 6 Fast Company online magazine piece headlined “The Norwegian Secret To Enjoying A Long Winter: Residents of Norway view their long dark winters as something to celebrate. How it’s possible to be cheerful for the next four months,” outlined the Norwegian notion of koselig, “that means a sense of coziness. It’s like the best parts of Christmas, without all the stress. People light candles, light fires, drink warm beverages, and sit under fuzzy blankets. There’s a community aspect to it too; it’s not just an excuse to sit on the couch watching Netflix.”  You can link to the article here at: http://www.fastcompany.com/3052970/how-to-be-a-success-at-everything/the-norwegian-secret-to-enjoying-a-long-winter

Lorelou Desjardins, who pens the Norwegian Frog in the Fjord blog, says, in fact, koselig is more even then being cosy. “Most English speakers translate it by ‘cosy’ but that term doesn’t even begin to cover everything that ‘koselig’ can express,” Desjardins writes at: http://afroginthefjord.com/2014/02/02/how-to-make-things-koselig/

“This concept is difficult to translate to those who do not live here, but basically anything can (and should) be koselig: a house, a conversation, a dinner, a person. It defines something/someone /an atmosphere that makes you feel a sense of warmth very deep inside in a way that all things should be: simple and comforting.”

Kari Leibowitz, a PhD student at Stanford University, spent August 2014 to last June on a Fulbright scholarship in Tromsø in northern Norway – a place “so far north that from late November to late January, the sun never climbs above the horizon,” Vanderkam notes in her Fast Company article.

Leibowitz studied the residents’ overall mental health, because rates of seasonal depression were lower than one might expect.

“At first, she was asking ‘Why aren’t people here more depressed?’ and if there were lessons that could be taken elsewhere. But once she was there, ‘I sort of realized that that was the wrong question to be asking,’ she says. When she asked people ‘Why don’t you have seasonal depression?’ the answer was “Why would we?'”

Vanderkam says that Leibowitz found that it “turns out that in northern Norway, ‘people view winter as something to be enjoyed, not something to be endured,’ and that makes all the difference.

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Standardizing time: Canada’s Sir Sandford Fleming

Thank Scottish-born Canadian surveyor, engineer and inventor Sir Sandford Fleming if you’re getting an extra hour of snooze time Sunday morning.

“Under the Official Time Act,” the Province of Manitoba helpfully reminded me in an e-mail Thursday, Oct. 29, 2015 at 2:06 p.m. (CDT), “daylight saving time ends on the first Sunday in November and resumes the second Sunday in March.The official time change back to standard time will occur this year at 2 a.m., Sunday, Nov. 1 at which time clocks should be set back to 1 a.m.”

While it has been gradually getting darker earlier in the evening since late June here in the Northern Hemisphere, the fact many of us can still travel home in waning daylight from work or school in the late afternoon in late October is in itself a credit to George Vernon Hudson, an English-born New Zealand amateur entomologist and astronomer who gave the world Daylight Saving Time (DST), a decade or so after Fleming’s development of Standard Time. Hudson’s day (and sometimes night) job was as a clerk (eventually chief clerk) in the post office in the capital of Wellington on North Island. Hudson’s shift-work job gave him enough leisure time to collect insects, and led him to value after-work hours of daylight for that pursuit when he was working days. On Oct.15, 1895, spring in New Zealand, he presented a paper called “On Seasonal Time-adjustment in Countries South of Lat. 30°”  to the Wellington Philosophical Society, proposing a two-hour daylight-saving shift, and after considerable interest was expressed in Christchurch on South Island, where 1,000 copies of his paper were printed in 1896, he followed up on Oct. 8, 1898 with a second paper, “On Seasonal Time,” also presented to the  Wellington Philosophical Society in springtime, and which can be found in the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, housed at the National Library of New Zealand in Wellington.

It is Fleming, however, who deserves most of the credit for both the international dateline, and standard time zones, conveniently divided into hourly segments, dating back to October 1884 and the International Prime Meridian Conference attended by 25 nations in Washington, D.C. Before Fleming invented standard time, noon in Kingston, Ontario was 12 minutes later than noon in Montréal and 13 minutes before noon in Toronto. Noon local time was the time when the sun stood exactly overhead. As for the international date line, it is an imaginary line at the 180º line of longitude that runs from the South Pole to the North Pole separating two consecutive calendar days.

It was Hipparchus of Nicea, a Greek mathematician and astronomer, who around 150 BCE, proposed a global grid of longitude and latitude lines to measure position. It was a coordinate system for locating points on the surface of a sphere. The vertical axis measured “latitude,” and the horizontal axis “longitude.”

Immediately to the left of the international date line the date in the Eastern Hemisphere is always one day ahead of the date (or day) immediately to the right of the international date line in the Western Hemisphere. There is no regulatory body or agency that can say “yes” or “no” if a country wants to switch sides. The country simply lets the international community and mapmakers know. It is not a perfectly straight line, however, and has been moved slightly over the years to accommodate needs of varied countries in the Pacific Ocean. The Midway Islands are in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) -11, and the Marshall Islands are in UTC+12. The two group of islands, on different sides of the international date line, share the same day and date for the last hour of the day. Samoa, which happens to sit in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, just 32 kilometres, or 20 miles, east of the international date line, went directly from Thursday – on Dec. 29, 2011 – to Saturday, Dec. 31 – without a Friday, Dec. 30. Talk about being anxious to party New Year’s Eve!

Kiribati, north of Samoa and near the equator, south of Hawaii, previously straddled the dateline. The eastern part of Kiribati was a whole day and two hours behind the western part of the country where its capital is located and a time difference of 23 hours between neighbouring islands. There were nine islands on the eastern side of the international date line, and 20 per cent of the population. On Jan. 1, 1995 it added an eastward extension to its section of the dateline so all 33 of its islands would have the same date and all of Kiribati would be in the Eastern Hemisphere.

Since 1892, when Samoa had two Monday, July 4ths, it had been east of the international date line until Dec. 29, 2011, after switching sides to coincide its days better with trading partners in the United States and Europe. Now, Samoa does a lot more business with New Zealand, Australia, China and Pacific Rim countries such as Singapore, so it switched back to the western side of the international date line.

After missing a train in 1876 in Ireland because its printed schedule listed p.m. instead of a.m., Fleming proposed a single 24-hour clock for the entire world with 24 time zones and within each zone the clocks would indicate the same time, with a one-hour difference between adjoining zones. Usually, when one travels in an easterly direction, a different time zone is crossed every 15 degrees of longitude, which is equal to one hour in time. Usually. China, however, has just one time zone, which makes the time zone uncommonly wide. In the extreme western part of China the sun is at its highest point at 3 p.m. and in the extreme eastern part at 11 a.m. In 1912, the year after the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, the Republic of China had created five time zones in the country, ranging from five and a half to eight and a half hours past Greenwich Mean Time. But in 1949, as the Communist Party consolidated control of the country, Chairman Mao Zedong ordered that all of China use Beijing time.

Fleming was born on Jan. 7, 1827 in the town of Kirkcaldy in the lieutenancy area of Fife on the east coast of Scotland. He emigrated to Canada in 1845, settling in Peterborough in southeastern Ontario.

This year, as we shift back to Standard Time from Daylight Saving Time at 2 a.m. tomorrow, which means an extra hour of slumber for many, but also causes me to ponder the potential complications of moving the clock back an hour and repeating the hour from 1 a.m. to 2 a.m. What happens when the clock jumps backward at 2 a.m. again to 1 a.m. for the second time that night and then repeats the hour? Would you have official log chronologies showing 1:13 a.m., 1:37 a.m., 1:56 a.m., 1:03 a.m. and 1:12 a.m. with the later two actually coming after the first three because they came after the clock fell back an hour? How would you distinguish which came first if need be, if someone needed to inspect the log months later (add the annotation 1:13 a.m. CDT or 1:03 a.m. CST?)

Most of Canada’s time experts work in a place called Building M-36 (which involuntarily conjures up for me visions of the X-Files and Area 51.) They work in the Frequency and Time program in the Measurement Science and Standards portfolio with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) on Montreal Road in Ottawa. Physicist Rob Douglas, the principal research officer, however, can be found on Saskatchewan Drive in Edmonton.

Douglas explains that “in a handwritten log the hour of ambiguity to which you refer can be simply resolved by appending the time zone (e.g. CST or CDT) to potentially ambiguous entries … e.g. “01:32 CDT” for the first pass through the hour of ambiguity and “1:32 CST” during the second pass.

“By explicitly writing the time zone as part of the time entry,” Douglas he added, “you also bypass the time acts’ defaults for official time – as you might wish to do if you are making agreements across a time zone boundary where there is the possibility of geographic ambiguity of time zone.

“The above procedure is very clear in Canada, but unfortunately less so in the USA,” said Douglas. “We in Canada can refer to ‘official’ or ‘legal’ time, which can alternate between being a ‘Standard Time’ or being a ‘Daylight Time.’ In the USA, to allow regulation by the federal government, both ‘Standard Time’ and ‘Daylight Time’ must be considered a ‘standard’ to avoid having time changes be a state responsibility under the residual powers clause of their constitution. If you think you may have to deal with the American ambiguity, it may be worthwhile to include an explanatory note in the log, such as ‘CST is defined as UTC-6h, and CDT is defined as UTC-5h.’

“If the times are being logged in a permanent logbook, with entries in chronological order for a fixed reckoning of time (i.e. in the absence of clock adjustments), then a simple way of removing the ambiguity is to include in the appropriate place in the log an entry such as “02:00 CDT – log’s clock changed from CDT to CST – 01:00 CST.

“If the log is a computer log, by using the operating system’s timestamps (for example as the time recorded for a file’s modification) the problem disappears since these timestamps are recorded as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC – the modern version of Greenwich Mean Time) which is never subjected to Standard/Daylight changes. The operating system re-interprets these timestamps into its version of the correct local time in effect for the particular UTC timestamp, and this re-interpretation may unfortunately still be expressed ambiguously, but the underlying UTC timestamp can be used to resolve any ambiguity about time zones and Daylight/Standard time.”

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1957 settled the dates for Thanksgiving in both Canada and the United States, but make mine Thanksgiving on Sunday, not Monday or Thursday, this year

If I had my druthers, all things being equal, I’d probably be waiting until Monday night to sit down to my Canadian Thanksgiving turkey dinner.

My general preference over the years has been to celebrate the Thanksgiving feast on, well, Thanksgiving, which if you’re in Canada, has meant on a Monday, more specifically, the second Monday of October since Jan. 31, 1957. While that’s been the settled date now for close to six decades, such has not always been the case.

Historically, up until 1957, the Thanksgiving holiday – and even the word “holiday” might be bracketed by quotation marks – was somewhat of a moveable feast, and in that way not dissimilar to the American Thanksgiving holiday, which, while it falls later than our annual harvest observance, also moved around until 1957 when it began to be consistently celebrated on the the fourth Thursday in November across the United States.

None of that is going to matter too much this year because I’ll be marking Thanksgiving on Sunday a day early (truth be told, a lot of Canadians seem to have their turkey dinner on Sunday rather than Monday, especially if travelling has been part of the equation.) In my case, it’s not travel causing the change; it’s the fact I am now a public sector worker, who belongs to the Manitoba Government and General Employees’ Union (MGEU) and is employed technically by the governing council of the University College of the North (UCN), and tasked with … opening the Thompson campus library on Monday evening, as it is part of my normal work schedule. This requires two forms and two approvals (by only one supervisor, however): one for personal unpaid leave at my request for Sunday evening, when I also normally work, so we can keep the library closed when it would otherwise normally be open, and another for paid overtime authorization for the statutory holiday Monday. My contribution to simplicity this year will be to eat my Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow instead of Monday.

Whether you celebrate Thanksgiving this year on the second Sunday of October tomorrow or second Monday Oct. 12 or on the fourth Thursday in November, as our American friends will on Nov. 26, celebrate Thanksgiving for exactly what the holiday, a moveable feast date, says it is – a time to give thanks for our abundance, our bounty and great good fortune to live in these two richly blessed lands of plenty

The history of Thanksgiving in Canada goes back to the English explorer, Sir Martin Frobisher, who had been trying to find a northern passage to the Orient. Frobisher didn’t succeed but he did establish a settlement in Northern America. In the year 1578, he held a formal ceremony, maybe in the eastern Arctic, maybe in what is now Newfoundland and Labrador, to give thanks for surviving the long journey.

The second Canadian Thanksgiving after Frobisher’s in 1578 was held in Nova Scotia in the late 1750s. Residents of Halifax also commemorated the end of the Seven Years’ War and the Treaty of Paris of 1763, where France formally ceded Canada to the British, with a day of Thanksgiving.

We celebrated Thanksgiving in Upper Canada on June 18, 1816 to mark both the  Treaty of Ghent on Dec. 24, 1814, which ended the War of 1812, and another Treaty of Paris almost 11 months later on Nov. 20, 1815, ending the war between Great Britain and France. Lower Canada had already had their Thanksgiving celebration almost a month before Upper Canada on May 21, 1816.

The cessation of the 1832 cholera epidemic, which claimed 9,000 lives, more than half of them in Lower Canada, was reason enough to have Thanksgiving on Feb. 6, 1833. The restoration of  peace with Russia at the Congress of Paris and a third Treaty of Paris after the three-year Crimean War was enough for the United Province of Canada, made up of Canada East and Canada West, to have Thanksgiving on June 4, 1856. The first Thanksgiving Day after Confederation was on April 15, 1872, to give thanks for the recovery of the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) from a serious illness.

In 1879, Parliament declared Nov. 6 a day of Thanksgiving and a national holiday.

Over the years many dates continued to be used for Thanksgiving, the most popular for many years being the third Monday in October. After the end of the First World War, both Armistice Day, as it was then known, and Thanksgiving were celebrated on the Monday of the week in which Nov. 11 fell.

Ten years later, in 1931, the two days became separate holidays and Armistice Day was renamed Remembrance Day.

Finally, on Jan. 31, 1957, Parliament proclaimed, “A Day of General Thanksgiving to Almighty God for the bountiful harvest with which Canada has been blessed … to be observed on the second Monday in October.”

In the United States, Thanksgiving is also a complex feast, perhaps even more so than in Canada. Originally, the Pilgrim Puritans of Massachusetts Bay Colony celebrated their first Thanksgiving Day on July 8, 1629. The following year, John Winthrop gave his famous sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” where he rightly predicted the colony would be metaphorically, as from salt and light in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, as recorded in the Gospel of Matthew, known as the “city on a hill, ” watched by the world.

“For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill,” Winthrop said. “The eyes of all people are upon us … we must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body.”

Almost four centuries later, their purposes perhaps not quite as lofty, Americans now celebrate Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November. It is the single-biggest domestic travel weekend of the year for Americans going home, wherever that might be, to visit family. While technically speaking, American Thanksgiving is a one-day holiday, like here in Canada, except on a Thursday instead of a Monday, for all intents and purposes it is part of a very long weekend (officially the Wednesday and Friday are not holidays in the United States, just the Thursday, but virtually no one – aside from unfortunate retail store clerks – works the Friday, as those of us who have lived there know.) Just try and get a government official on the telephone after mid-afternoon Wednesday, or all day Friday of American Thanksgiving week if you wish to test this hypothesis.

While the fourth Thursday in November is also often the last Thursday as well (as it is this year), even a cursory glance through the years of our Gregorian calendar reveal some years, of course, have five Thursdays. Such was the case in 1939, the last year of the Great Depression, when Thanksgiving was scheduled to fall on Nov. 30, not only on the fifth Thursday of November but the very last day of November as well in fact, and less than a month before Christmas, causing President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, to use the moral authority of his office by proclamation to move Thanksgiving up a week to Nov. 23 at the initiative of Lew Hahn, general manager of the Retail Dry Goods Association, who had warned U.S. Secretary of Commerce Harry Hopkins as early as August that the late calendar date of Thanksgiving that year could have an adverse effect on retail sales, and that an earlier Thanksgiving could perhaps boost the bottom line.

To understand the rationale more fully, harken back to that bygone era where it was quaintly considered bad form for retailers to display Christmas decorations or have Christmas sales before the celebration of Thanksgiving, as opposed to the current day-after Halloween kick-off. Or is it the day after Labor Day now Christmas sales start? One of the two methinks.

Roosevelt, however, had waited until Oct. 31 to announce his thinking on the matter of moving up Thanksgiving by a week 23 days later. The short-notice change in dates affected the holiday plans of millions of Americans; while there was plenty of confusion and many were inconvenienced, others hit pay dirt.

On the downside, many college football teams traditionally ended their seasons with games against their main rivals on Thanksgiving, and had scheduled them in 1939 for Nov. 30. Some athletic conferences had rules permitting games only through the Saturday following Thanksgiving. Changing the date could mean many teams would play their season finale in empty stadiums or not at all. The change also reportedly caused problems for college registrars, schedulers and calendar makers.

The Thanksgiving winners in 1939 lived in Colorado, Mississippi and Texas. Those three states observed two Thanksgiving holidays that year; the just-proposed Thursday, Nov. 23, and then they did it all over again a week later on the originally scheduled holiday on Thursday, Nov. 30.

Now, that’s something to express gratitude for, unless your were a turkey taking a double-hit on your numbers possibly in  Colorado, Mississippi and Texas. All told, 23 states and the District of Columbia, of the 48 states in those pre-statehood days for Alaska and Hawaii (both joined the union 20 years later in 1959), recognized Nov. 23 as Thanksgiving in 1939, while 22 states stuck with the original Nov. 30 date as planned.

Gradually, the fourth Thursday in November as Thanksgiving, with some see-sawing back-and-forth and general waffling, took a more permanent hold throughout the United States. Texas was the last state to change its holiday law, observing the last Thursday in November as Thanksgiving when there are five Thursdays in the month for the final time on Thursday, Nov. 29, 1956.

The considerable, and for a time in the early 1940s, still ongoing confusion surrounding when Thanksgiving should be celebrated was not surprisingly diffused in the popular culture as ripe material for laughs through cinema, as well as radio. “In the 1940 Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies cartoon Holiday Highlights, directed by Tex Avery,” Wikipedia notes, “the introduction to a segment about Thanksgiving shows the holiday falling on two different dates, one ‘for Democrats’ and one a week later ‘for Republicans.’”

In the 1942 musical Holiday Inn, starring Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, a classic black-and-white film, which I borrowed in DVD format from the Thompson Public Library a few years ago, there is a delightful parody where a November calendar appears on which an animated turkey jumps back and forth between the two weeks, until he gives up and shrugs his shoulders at the audience.

And speaking of turkeys getting the last laugh, no discussion of American Thanksgiving is complete, of course, without addressing the issue of the Presidential turkey pardon. In a piece called “Why presidents pardon turkeys — a history” by Domenico Montanaro, PBS Newshour last November offered the comprehensive history of the practice, which you can read at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/presidents-pardon-turkeys-history/#.VHbAtv1lVLA.facebook

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