Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, but beware the Ghost of Christmas Eve newsroom Baileys Irish Cream liqueur

 In response to a query, I wrote here yesterday about my usual Christmastime traditions over the years, and how some of my traditions date back many years, while 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. 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.

While I touched on food, be it sausage meat dressing or stuffing for Jeanette’s perfectly cooked juicy Christmas turkey, Land O’Lakes sour cream cornbread, Christmas fruitcake, 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 offerings; as well as the classic Christmas movie genre, I might well have added a few more traditions I developed over the years that festively often blended the personal and professional, private and public.

Ecclesiastes (hello Qoheleth, hello King Solomon?) had it about right, I think, when whosoever he was wrote, “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” In terms of the Christmas season for many that means travelling long miles only to be thrust together in close quarters with other annually seasonally-close family members and friends who hold somewhat different cultural, political, sports or even religious beliefs than you do. In terms of the latter, this happens even among Christians, hard as that may be to believe, marking the birth of our saviour some 2,000-plus years ago in Bethlehem – or is it Nazareth? Take your pick. The Gospels of Saint Matthew and Saint Luke opt for Bethlehem, while Saint Mark and Saint John seem to lean more toward Nazareth.

As for the year, month or day of Jesus’ birth, you can likely rule out Dec. 25 for the latter two and settle on sometime between 7BC and 4BC for the year. Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI, in his book, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, published in November 2012, wrote Jesus was born several years earlier than commonly believed because the entire Christian calendar is based on a miscalculation by a sixth-century monk known as Dionysius Exiguus, or in English, Dennis the Small.

Fast-forward a couple of thousand years and 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.

The following year at Christmas 1997, I was back in Peterborough, Ontario at the Peterborough Examiner, a print-only daily newspaper back in those days, where I had worked previously from 1985 to 1989. During my first stint, I was the court beat reporter. Now, I was the city hall reporter. The Examiner, of course, was the paper Robertson Davies edited between 1942 and 1955. It was while editing the Peterborough Examiner that Davies, considered by townspeople as an eccentric bearded figure in the small-town world of Peterborough in the 1940s, would establish himself as one of Canada’s most important 20th century literary figures with the creation and development of his Samuel Marchbanks character, mining his daily newspaper experiences in the Queen of the Kawarthas for many of the characters and situations, which would appear in his novels and plays.

On Dec. 23, 1997, I was at a dinner party hosted by the late playwright Rhonda Payne at her home on Parkhill Road East in Peterborough. I had met Rhonda, author of the play “Stars in the Sky Morning,” a tale of the hardships of women on the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland, a month earlier at Karen Hicks – at another dinner party. The National Post described Rhonda in 1999 as a “national treasure” and if ever there was a bon vivant, it was Rhonda, which is why the evening was so convivial and is perhaps what induced me to have more red wine at dinner than I might normally during the work week. You see, the Examiner had a long tradition of its own of granting employees what was quaintly termed “early leaving” at noon on both Christmas Eve and New Years Eve. What’s an extra glass, or maybe even two, of red, I thought to myself? Tomorrow is Christmas Eve, and really, how hard can it be? All I have to do is more or less physically show up in the newsroom for the half-day morning.

When I got home from Rhonda’s dinner party that night, the red light was flashing repeatedly and rapidly on my old General Electric answering machine (I think voicemail existed, but was still in its early years). It seemed odd to have so many messages awaiting receipt, but I went ahead and pushed the play button. Lo and behold it was Jim Hendry, then city editor of the Examiner, telling me that there was going to be a press conference at 8 a.m. Dec. 24 at the Peterborough County courthouse with City of Peterborough and County of Peterborough officials on hand to answer questions about the province seizing welfare files earlier in the day on Dec. 23. Many of the details are blurry after 22 years, but I believe welfare was perhaps a shared city-county municipal responsibility in those days, and the province was intent on upsetting that apple cart through shifting responsibilities and financial obligations between the two entities in what was called “downloading” in the days of the Harris government.

I barely survived the press conference. Once back in the second-floor newsroom of the old Peterborough Examiner building at Hunter and Water streets, I quickly picked up the telephone on my desk, across from Jack Marchen, then the court reporter, to give the late Ron Chittick, then chief administrative officer of the City of Peterborough, a quick call before he vanished for Christmas, as I realized back in the office I had a couple of unanswered questions still. Jack Marchen had been sitting across the desk from me in the newsroom when I left in August 1989 and he was still sitting across the desk from me when I returned. Phil Tyson, who sat beside me when I left, was also sitting beside me when I returned.

Time elapsed had foolishly led me to forget one of Jack’s Christmas traditions, which I should have remembered from the 1980s. But eight years had passed since then and there had been the dinner party the previous evening. Jack, unofficially, of course, and off-the-record, if anyone asks, traditionally would walk around the newsroom the morning of Christmas Eve, a bottle of Baileys Irish Cream liqueur and white Styrofoam coffee cups in hand, to pass out some Christmas cheer to his friends and colleagues.

I’m not sure what I was thinking, or even if I was thinking, but I happily accepted my coffee cup full of Baileys, as Jack handed it to me, which in all fairness kind of looked like a cup of coffee for those like myself, who go heavy on the cream. I slugged it back in one gulp, which does in retrospect seem kind of odd if I actually thought it might be hot coffee, and my brain froze instantaneously – mid-sentence, mid-question to Ron. For a thirty-second eternity, or so it seemed, there was dead air on the phone line as I failed to articulate the remainder of the question I was posing to Ron.

That, friends, was tradition and Christmas Eve 1997.

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, below 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 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 Garwood Robb’s “A special gift from years ago” as a guest “Soundings” column on the editorial page around Christmas. It opens: “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….”

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 can be found online at either: http://garwood2009.blogspot.ca/2009/12/memory-from-long-agorevisited.html or https://www.thompsoncitizen.net/opinion/columnists/soundings-1.1360060

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.

And while it is likely too soon to call it a tradition, I’ve become rather fond in recent years of re-posting on Facebook at least two YouTube videos: “Mog’s Christmas Calamity,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuRn2S7iPNU&feature=share) based on author and illustrator Judith Kerr’s Mog, who first appeared in the book “Mog the Forgetful Cat,” in 1970, and who falls asleep on Christmas Eve, and unwittingly creates unimaginable chaos, leading the Thomas family to fear that Christmas will have to be cancelled, and Igniter Media’s “A Social Network Christmas,” an artistic take on how the story of the nativity might have read had a social network existed at the time of Jesus’s birth, which you will find here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sghwe4TYY18

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

 

 

Banned and challenged books: Libraries take a stand

Spring of 1975: I was an idealistic, although in retrospect naive as to how power actually works in practice, 18-year-old advocate of intellectual freedom as Grade 12 wound down and I saw the increasing efforts of Ken Campbell and his ilk attempt to ban important literature in high school libraries and banish it from the curriculum. Campbell, a Baptist evangelical from Milton, Ontario, had founded a lobby group called Renaissance Canada a year earlier in 1974. While the library and English Department at Oshawa Catholic High School were in no way disposed to buckle under to such a censorship challenge, I saw the fight was real, especially in Peterborough and surrounding area, as downtown Pentecostals, not to mention Bible Belt evangelical adherents from Burleigh Falls to Buckhorn, on the southern edge of the Canadian Shield north of Peterborough, were making rumblings and by early 1976 would publicly launch the Peterborough Committee for Citizens on Decency as their campaign vehicle to ban Margaret Laurence ‘s The Diviners, published just two years earlier in 1974, taking their fight to the public in venues ranging from signing petitions in Peterborough churches to letters to the editor in newspapers, right up to appearing as delegations before trustees of what is now known as the Kawartha Pine Ridge District School Board. Laurence was living in Lakefield near Peterborough.

In 1968 the Ontario Ministry of Education had given local school boards the authority to determine which literary works would be used in English classes. In the winter of 1976, writes Sheila Turcon, an archivist in the Mills Memorial Library’s William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, “complaints were lodged at two Peterborough high schools against both The Diviners and Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women (1971). Both books should have been reviewed by a special committee which had been established two years earlier to review complaints against other books. However, only Laurence’s book was dealt with by the committee.

“The book had been opposed by Jim Telford, a board of education trustee and member of the Pentecostal community, and Rev. Sam Buick. They and their supporters told the Globe and Mail that the novel ‘reeked of sordidness.’ The review committee did not agree and gave its unanimous support for the retention of The Diviners.”

Buick at the time had pastored the Dublin Street Pentecostal Church in downtown Peterborough for three years since 1973.

“On April 22, 1976, the full board decided ten votes to six to keep the book on its approved textbook list,” Turcon said. “Despite this ruling, only Bob Buchanan from Lakefield Secondary School continued to teach it.”

In the end, the new Campbellites did not prevail, but the fight was very public, very protracted and very nasty.

It was in the months leading up to the emergence of the full backdrop in Peterborough, living  50 miles or so down the road to the southwest in Oshawa, I took it upon myself to form a group of high school students from the half dozen or so high schools in Oshawa at the time called the Students Against Arbitrary Censorship Committee (or S.A.A.C.C.) Not the most elegant name or acronym, but I hadn’t enjoyed the benefit of a Loyalist College advertising or marketing course at that point in my life. That would have to wait until the early 1980s when I studied print journalism. So there it was, the Catholic kid, from the faith that brought you the Index Llibrorum Prohibitorum, leading the freedom-to-read charge. Poor Sister Conrad Lauber, my erudite principal. No doubt my S.A.A.C.C. and later Grade 13 high school debating activities have been almost enough on their own to merit her a get-out-of-purgatory-free card, in the unlikely event she might some day need it, simply for enduring my campaigns and playing devil’s debating advocate under the school’s banner. And while my school, and Sister Conrad, stood up, however, uncomfortably at times for my free speech rights, not all Catholics by any means did. After one of my letters to the editor appeared in the op-ed section of the Catholic Register, a gentleman from Geraldton, Ontario took the trouble to write me a handwritten letter, sending it to my home address on Nipigon Street, telling me I was heading for hell. Anonymous telephone calls crisply conveyed similar messages. Pity my long suffering parents. Aside from The Diviners, some of the books Campbell wanted to ban 40 years ago, such as J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, have remained perennial favourites of censorship advocates, and still show up on banned and challenged book list challenges.

When I said earlier I was naive at 18 as to how power actually works in practice, it is because I thought things like common sense and logic would trump know-nothing ignorance in any given debate and decision, and those advocating banning a book might actually have bothered to read it first. That sort of thing. And I didn’t necessarily think this would be a life-long struggle between the forces of intellectual freedom and ignorance, not to put too fine a point on it. Of course, I was wrong on all counts. Hence the need 40 years on in the struggle to have annual events like “Banned Book Week” from Sept. 27 to Oct. 3, spearheaded by sponsoring organizations such as the Chicago-based Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association, the American Booksellers Association, the Association of American Publishers, the National Association of College Stores and PEN American Center.

While I still feel just as strongly and passionately about intellectual freedom and taking a stand against book banners, I have also these many years on, learned to see the world, dare I say it, in many more shades of grey, than my young black-and-white 18-year-old idealist self. I may still disagree with book banners, but Campbell, who I never actually met, was something of an evangelical caricature for me as a teenager. I know real-life evangelicals now and count a fair number as good friends. They’re not all book banners. And being a Protestant (or Catholic for that matter) evangelical is not incompatible with being an intellectual. Who would have thought that at 18? Not me. And even those who would still ban books I wouldn’t, I’d be hard pressed not to concede that both the world is a nastier, trashier place in some ways than it was 40 years ago (probably the lament of every aging generation, I know) and that I really can’t always accurately judge people’s motives from the outside and what’s inside their hearts, a gift I seemed to have thought I possessed in my youth.

After spending upwards of 30 years working in print journalism, with the exception mainly of the five-year period between 1990 and 1995, when I redressed my youthful lackluster academic performance in university by returning first to Trent University in Peterborough to complete my Honours B.A. in History and then on to Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, as an Ontario Graduate Scholar, for a couple of years to do a master’s degree in History, I had the opportunity to return in a small way earlier this year to academia working simply as a clerk at the University College of the North (UCN) new Thompson campus library here in Northern Manitoba. There is something so very Victorian in that word clerk that makes me want to pronounce it “clark,” as I imagine perhaps joining Charles Dickens over a Christmas bowl of Smoking Bishop, that particular concoction of Clementines, sugar, cloves, moderately sweet red wine and ruby port.

I am happy to note the “Mission of the University College of the North Libraries” explicitly affirms endorsing “the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which includes, along with the right to express thoughts publicly, the fundamental right of access of every person to all expressions of knowledge. The intellectual freedom fostered and protected by the enshrinement of these rights is basic to the proper functioning of the University and to the healthy development of Canadian society of which it is a part. The University College Libraries supports the principles of intellectual freedom as they are pertinent to all of its activities.”

The 10 books pictured here – Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath, Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Story of a Part-Time Indian, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover – are all found in our stacks for students, faculty, staff and community users to borrow and read. They are also books that have been banned or challenged, some perennially, in other places.  “A challenge is an attempt to remove or restrict materials, based upon the objections of a person or group,” says the American Library Association.  “A banning is the removal of those materials. Challenges do not simply involve a person expressing a point of view; rather, they are an attempt to remove material from the curriculum or library, thereby restricting the access of others.”

The American Library Association “promotes the freedom to choose or the freedom to express one’s opinions even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those viewpoints to all who wish to read them.”

You can discover the “top ten frequently challenged books lists of the 21st century” to date and the methodology used to make that determination by checking out the Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association webpage http://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top10#toptenlists

The Banned Books Week website “drew more than 92,000 users and had more than 207,000 page views in 2014,” Publishers Weekly noted Sept. 18. “, Banned Books Week 2015 will, for the second consecutive year, focus on a single category – this time young adult books, which dominates the list of the 311 challenged books in 2014, led by Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. (In 2014, graphic novels was the category of focus.) “There have been very serious flaps over why YA books have very dark themes,” noted Judy Platt, chair of the BBW co-ordinating committee and director of Free Expression Advocacy at AAP.”

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