It’s a rare warm autumn today, 13ºC as I write, and so I decided to do my local Queen Square Press deliveries this morning on foot.

As a result, I walked more than 7,000 steps before noon:

Because my deliveries took me into the heart of midtown, I took the opportunity to enjoy a bánh mì from Madame Vuong on the way home, making their street food actual street food:

The forecast called for rain, but it has yet to come. A very pleasant way to start the day.

Because of COVID-19, Charlottetown’s Christmas Parade was rejigged to become a multi-night neighbourhood ramble by a small contingent of emergency service vehicles. Tonight was the night for our “500 Lots” neighbourhood, and the crew just passed through, punctuated by Santa Claus on the PA.

The traditional parade is a seemingly-never-ending cavalcade of service clubs, marching bands, and every single fire truck from the surrounding 50 miles, made bearable by our habit, in recent years, of viewing it from the warmer confines of the front counter at Mr. Sushi.

This year we didn’t have to take off our slippers. It was on and done in about 35 seconds, and yet managed to convey all the community Christmas spirit that was needed. Kudos to the city mothers and fathers for finding a way to pull this off. 

Nadja, who I have known since she was born, and whose mother I have known as long as anyone, has become a tea merchant, producing tea made from sustainably foraged, locally sourced plants.

It’s been almost a month since I opened an online shop for my letterpress goods. While I’ve dabbled in Etsy before, I never did it with heart and it was never sustained, so this is my first bona fide experience as an ecommerce retailer.

I’ve added a few additional items to the shop today:

• A Map is the Greatest of All Epic Poems, a broadside printed in 2018 on a serious of reproduction historic maps. I single copies of five different maps available.
• Japanese-bound Book, a product of the bookbinding course I took from Jennifer Brown in 2013.
• 50 Cents Stamp Book, another product of Jennifer’s course.
• Tidings of Comfort and Joy, my Christmas card from 2018.

Here’s how things have gone so far:

• Number of orders: 20
• Revenue: $464.71
• Number of visitors: 376
• Conversion rate: 5.3%
• Most viewed products:
  • Map of Charlottetown
  • MMXX!
  • I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time…
  • The Island Hymn
  • Set A Goal
• Most sold products:
  • MMXX!
  • You Are On Mute
  • Map of Charlottetown
  • Clear Cloudy Rain Snow
  • Ask Questions card

It turns out that I love fulfilling orders, which is no surprise as I’m a love of stationery, and this is a funded excuse to indulge that.

In New horizons for office furniture, Matt Webb ruminates what we sit on (or swim through) when we Zoom.

I spend so much time on Zoom these days, I would prefer to be bobbing around in a salt-water bath with a virtual reality headset strapped to my face. Like the precogs in Minority Report.

Let me christen the term whergonomics for this emerging field.

“What kind of tree are you looking for?”, asked the jaunty Christmas forester.

“Um,” I replied, uncertain of how to respond (evergreen? festive? broad-needled? post-modern?).

Sensing that I was out of my depth, he deftly sauntered behind the tree that had caught my eye.

“Tall and bushy?”, he asked, Vanna Whiting my eyeline.

“Yes!”, I exclaimed.

He hefted the tree into the back of my KIA Soul. I paid him $40. I drove up the hill toward home.

It never occurred to me that the tree wouldn’t fit. But I need not have worried, as there are four inches to spare (I suppose there’s a standard Canadian ceiling height that trees are grown to hew to?).

“Catherine, where do we keep the Christmas tree stand? And that skirty thing?”

That’s what I’d normally be shouting up from the basement.

Except that I know the answer, because I put them away myself last January, as Catherine was in Palliative Care. Or at least I think I did. Perhaps someone did it for me?

Catherine went into hospital on December 17 last year, and came home on December 22. Her mother surprised us with a visit from Ontario on Christmas Eve. Catherine loved Christmas, and she especially loved being a mother at Christmas. It was as if the fates opened a window for her to have one last one, with those she loved, and who loved her.

And so the putting up of the Christmas tree this year is bittersweet: it’s the start of marking a beginning of an ending. But there’s a degree of “fuck yes, we’re still here, and we’re doing this thing” to it as well.

I got down in the dumps this week because all the dead movie wives leave years worth of birthday, anniversary, and holiday letters to their surviving movie husbands, and my real world (dyslexic) Catherine did not.

But then, watching Oliver carry the tree into the house, I realized she’d left me Oliver, and everything she taught him, and every example she set for him.

As Catherine’s prognosis evolved to “days, perhaps a week,” these were my words:

I wrote to a good friend this afternoon that “It’s sad, in a deep-down-body-sad kind of way. But it’s not only sad.”

And that is true: we laugh together when Oliver makes a joke. We gossip. I pass on kind wishes from near and far. And we sink into the contentment that Catherine radiates.

Catherine continues to radiate through this season. It won’t be nearly at all the same without her. But it will be something else.

Merry Christmas, everyone. Let’s do this thing!

There’s a Christmas Tree stand at the end of Prince Street in front of Founders’ Hall; mindful of “killer drought combined with Trump election protests and COVID means there might not be enough trees”-style headlines, I knew I needed to act fast.

So, roughly 20 days earlier than I’m used to, I stopped in and picked one up. And then made Oliver carry it into the house. It’s drying out from the rain in the vestibule as I write.

If you are a character in Oliver’s cinematic universe, you have, no doubt, been the recipient of his strident lobbying on behalf of Christmas, often distilled to its essence: send cards and gifts!!

Catherine, you see, was the Head of Christmas in our family. Leaving me to be cast in the role, often with some cause, of steely curmudgeon. The kind of person who leaves securing a tree until all the trees are gone, who wonders what the point of Christmas cake is, at all.

So, sensing a pending vacuum, Oliver has launched a marketing campaign to save Christmas.

Understandably, given past performance, he is skeptical about my protests that This Year I Will Rise To The Occasion. Truth be told, I will rise to the occasion. But it make take a year or two for Oliver to believe this.

So, fear not, Christmas is not in jeopardy.

If it are moved, nonetheless, to help Oliver fill the holiday vacuum, he is, confoundingly, non-specific in his wishes, which are “things that bring joy and relieve sadness and grief.” The ball is in your court, Christmas-lovers.

Remember other continents!? Ten years ago today my crew was en route from Munich to Basel by train, and feeling the jetlag heavy.

While I was printing my MMXX! cards last night, I was also filming what I was doing, using my iPhone and a tripod.

I’m not an accomplished filmmaker, and know very little of camera angles and visual storytelling; what I tried to do was to tell the story of how the idea came to life, and how the typesetting and printing process works from beginning to end; I hope I succeeded, at least a little. I learned a lot editing this in iMovie: the mind is capable of filling in so many gaps that it’s possible to trim big stretches of what I might have otherwise thought as invaluable action; watching the video again now, I see I could have done even more of this.

Thanks to Olle for the filmmaking inspiration; he has started a YouTube channel for his tool-cleaning videos, and his efforts made me remember that I carry around a powerful video camera in my pocket.

The music is from Scott Buckley, an Australian composer who’s generously released much of his music with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License; I used his Solecism, Snowfall, and Wanderlust tracks.

I’ve uploaded the movie to YouTube (with captions), YouDescribe (with audio description); you can also download it here (without captions or audio description) or watch it below (it’s licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License).

I decided it wasn’t just to release the video without captions or audio description, so, with the help of my friend Cheryl, I figured out how to add these; I welcome feedback on these particularly, as they are a freshman outing, and I want to get better at it. The audio description suffers, I think, from the relative volume of the music and the description, but I couldn’t find a way to adjust this in YouDescribe.

I had a lot of fun doing this.