Christmas time is Here Again

use it to best advantage

Time to wish a happy Christmas and prosperous New Year to my little blog community. If any of you are not Christians, have a happy Christmas anyway.

I do seem to have a consolidated following on my blog. I have a few people who open almost everything I write. Others seem to be interested only in specific topics.

Almost all readers seem to come from the e-mail lists of the two blog platforms. They seem to have drifted in and subscribed over the five years I have been running this project. Sometimes, if someone refers one of my articles to another platform, usually Reddit, I get a surge of readers from that site.

I am severely shadow banned. A few opens come from the substack community. Nothing anymore comes from search engines.

Every now and then, I get someone come in and go over my entire archive, seemingly reading everything over several days. It is also obvious that I have a lot of ghost followers, people who hide behind tracker blockers.

The reality is that it has become impossible to get a clear idea of just how many people are reading me. If I were charging money, I would at least know who my paid readers are. But I have a few readers and for that I am grateful.

I am spending Christmas at home, as I usually do. It has been a long time since I have gone anywhere for Christmas. I think that makes for a better holiday season.

Many people try to have a holly-jolly old time Christmas in the modern age. Usually, that makes it very miserable for them. It is better to just use the year end as a time to pull back from the world, rest, and think about how it has gone over the last year.

The last time I experienced a truly traditional type of Christmas was the last one before my grandfather sold his farm and moved into town. That would have been 1972. All my great number of Aunts, Uncles, and cousins would be together in this one large room, opening presents.

When it was not being used for family gatherings, the back room would be used for games, and as a workshop for various operations. Many of us had to sit on the floor or on boxes. Due to a lack of beds, many of us sacked out on the floor, after bringing our own sleeping bags and mats.

Many of these people I have not seen since that year. Instead, Christmas came to be a matter of visiting whoever in my home city was holding the Christmas gathering that year. One year I even paid for half of the turkey.

I soon learned to avoid a couple of my more deranged relatives and their madcap Christmas road trips. We had to get going at six in the morning, frantically try to stop in at everyone’s house for a hundred mile radius around, and arrive home totally exhausted after midnight.

Gradually, strange quarrels divided most of my family into factions. As well, there was an increased distance as the younger generations moved further away. The older ones became less able to travel, or to accommodate guests.

Among the older ones, I came to be seen as a trouble maker and unemployed bum, a family disgrace. I started staying home for Christmas, or going out to briefly visit a few nearby friends and neighbors.

When I came to Toronto, I lived for some years not far from what some people called ‘The Maritimer Ghetto.’ It was also sometimes called ‘cabbage town’. At that time it was still a viable community.

They held a very good dinner every Christmas Day in a church basement. A very good band playing ‘Down Easter’ type music played. People would try dancing to it but the hall was usually too crowded to do much dancing.

They also served some pretty good food. Sometimes you would have to eat it standing up due up the shortage of chairs. At the time it seemed adequate to me.

One year the person who had organized this died suddenly a few weeks before Christmas. There was an attempt to hold it, but it fell apart. The same year, the lead Fiddler of the band became too ill to continue.

This function had continued for over thirty years. I heard that it limped along for a few more years until covid ended it for good. That old neighborhood has pretty much died, the old residents driven out as rooming houses were bought up and renovated by the despised “yuppies”.

By that time, I had moved further south, into a more prosperous neighborhood. I was in a ‘mixed social housing’ building, meaning a mix of ‘market rent’ and rent geared to income people. This is a better way to run social housing, insuring it is maintained and operated properly.

Many people want to live in this well planned, well located neighborhood, even if some of us ‘rent geared to income’ people also live next door.

Since I have lived here, there have been sporadic attempts to hold Christmas gatherings for people who have nowhere else to go on Christmas day. It never works out, because no one wants to put in the time and hassle to organize it.

There are reasons why no one wants to take on the job of organizing things like this. Most social housing buildings seem to have one obnoxious narcissist who wants to dominate the building. Neither the residents or the building staff want to take the bitch on.

The housing bureaucracy is just as much a problem. No one wants to do the three months-in-advance paper chase to organize a simple event in the common room. So it sits empty unless the housing authority’s ‘community workers’ organize something.

So that was how Christmas had come to be marked here. It was mostly a children’s party, paid for by a fund which was theoretically under the resident’s control. A local politician loved to come and play Santa Claus.

This ended with Covid. Instead, some of the moms in here organized a Christmas hamper distribution. This was fairly successful.

However, some “community worker” types thought there should be a Christmas party, catered by one of the firms on the housing authority’s list, for a slightly extravagant fee. This turned out to be a covid spreading event and is not happening again this year.

Alas, the hamper distribution does not seem to be happening this year, either. It is not hard to see why people are so apathetic these days. Every initiative gets stepped on.

So you see why I stay home and do my own Christmas things. I stock up for my own version of a Christmas feast.

I do not try to get a turkey anymore. I just get a roaster chicken and tell it to pretend it is a turkey. Then for New Year’s, I do a ham. I can live off the leftovers for a couple of days.

I also find a nice block of halvah. Many younger people do not even know what it is. It is a kind of candy made with ground sesame paste.

It originates in the middle east, but the Ukrainians used to consume it at Christmas time. It became a Christmas thing all over the Canadian prairies, as part of the Ukraine cultural influence. My grandparents would get some for the Christmas gathering.

I like the stuff and sometimes eat it at times other than Christmas. It has been hard to get in Toronto. I would go up to Kensington market to get it, though it was the Middle Eastern version of it.

I have discovered a Ukrainian shop at St. Lawrence market which sells Ukrainian style delicacies, including good halvah. They also seem to be big Ukraine nationalists, so I have to struggle to keep a straight face when I visit them.

Donations to help war relief in Ukraine? I think Zelinsky and company are already getting more than enough money from Canada.

I do not do those little Christmas trees some people set up in their apartments. I get some amaryllis bulbs and time them so they bloom right around holiday season.

So, with all this prepared, I will sit back and watch all the Christmas stuff on cable, or from my DVD library. I am fond of the old Peter Paul and Mary Christmas special from the 1980’s. Sometimes I still encounter oldies like ‘Mary Poppins’.

The television companies used to have some standard Christmas movies. Many of them had nothing in particular to do with Christmas. But with the advent of streaming services, that has become pointless.

My nominee for the ultimate holiday/year end movie is ‘The Dead’. This is based on the story by James Joyce, and filmed by John Huston during the nineties. One of these years, I should do a detailed review of it.

Basically, it is set in Ireland in the years just before the Irish revolution of 1916. Some middle class people get together to celebrate the feast of epiphany. This, to old time Catholics, marks the end of the Christmas season.

It is a beautifully done period piece and a near perfect film. It mulls over the idea of what to do with one’s life. The people in the film mostly think they are living the good life, while drowning in mediocrity.

At the periphery of the action are all the signs that the world around them is headed for an explosion. They are mostly oblivious. They are more concerned about the elderly grandmother of several of them, who was once a famous singer, and is now clearly close to death.

Near the end of the evening, one of the guests has a minor breakdown. Her husband takes her back to their hotel. They talk it over.

A song triggered a memory for her, and she revealed something she had never told her husband. When she was a young girl, a boy was madly in love with her. He was dying of tuberculosis. Her father forbade them to see each other.

He broke out of a sanitarium and ran through a snow storm to try to see her again. He caught pneumonia, which finished him off. She has felt guilty about it the rest of her life.

Finally, she cries herself to sleep, and the husband sits looking out the window at the falling snow. He contemplates the point to existence. Is it better to life a quiet life and fade away with old age, or to commit oneself to a passionate cause, even a mad and deluded one?

He finally just goes to sleep himself, and the snow keeps falling, on the living and the dead. Roll credits.

The film is something worth digging out every other year at Christmas time, to inspire contemplation about life at the best time of year for it.

We are going to have a white Christmas in Toronto. It has been a very cold winter, so far. The actual climate does tend to refute ‘climate change’.

The weather woman says it will warm up a bit for Christmas day. I will likely put on my Draeger mask and do the streetcar tour of the beautiful older parts of Toronto.

So these are the kinds of things owly old men like me do over the holidays. Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.