Merry Christmas, all

It was around this day, fifty six years ago, that my grandfather spoke his last intelligible words. The story goes like this:

My grandfather was born in deeply Catholic Ireland in the late 1800s, and emigrated to Canada and the Toronto area in the early twentieth cntury during a period where, though 'no papists or dogs signs' had become less common (though not gone altogether) it was still very common for help wanted ads to end with the words 'Protestants preferred'. Toronto was stilll a very Protestant city and would remain so for years. The mayors of Toronto were still a long string of Grand Masters of the Orange Lodge and would remain so until the nineteen fifties when Nathan Philips won the position. My grandfather took manual labour jobs working construction and eventually as a grave digger to support his family as bst he could. He had a stroke some in the early 1960's if memory serves, and and it left him chair and bed rid. The only word he could speak after the stroke was 'there' which he would repeat until someone figured out what it was he was trying to say. Oddly enough, my eldest sister, who was between 3 and six in those years was surpsiginly adept at figuring out what 'there, there' meant, and it could mean anything from 'I need to go to the bathroom' to 'That picture is crooked, and if I am going to be stuck staring at this wall all day long, someone had better straighten it out.'

At any rate, on this day many years ago, or so I have been told, (I hadn't been born yet, though my mother would have been pregnant with me at the time) the family was in a rush to leave to go to Midnight Mass, which my grandfather could not attend. So they parked his chair in front of the television, and rushed to find a televised Midnight Mass for him to watch. Finding one, they made sure he would be comfortable for the next hour and a bit and hurriied off, blissfully unaware that they had left the devout Catholic man who had suffered much bigotry over his life for his faith watching a Protestant service. Upon their return, the anger and disgust which my grandfather must have felt roused him to speak the last words which were not 'there there'. He glared at them with what my mother called his 'black look' and muttered: 'Stupid Idiots!' For that occasion, they did not need my sister to translate.

He would live for almost another year, but after that he went back into his 'There there.' The family cared for and loved him until the end.

In that spirit, here's Carols from Kings. Merry Christmas, all

I know, it's Anglican.  Just go with it for the moment.  And Merry Christmas.