(I have written and told this story many times. Christmas would not be Christmas without telling it again.)

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Fresh fallen snow protested beneath my gumboots breaking trail down the unploughed lane. Dry, sharp squeaks, not unlike the cries of cheap chalk scrapped against too clean a blackboard. 

Skuur-eek, skuur-eek.

The boots ignored the sounds. They moved on, ribbed rubber bottoms and laced high leather tops creating a meandering wake in the ankle-deep snow. To each side of the trail, drifted snow leaned tiredly against the backsides of the bungalows, dropped there to rest by an impatient Christmas Eve blizzard just passed through. 

Faint strains of music joined the squeaking as I approached our back fence. I stopped to hear the music more clearly, now identifiable as singing voices escaping through an open window. I shuffled forward and listened to the notes float out crisply and clearly, then mingle with smoke rising from the chimneys. Notes and smoke rose together into an icy midnight sky illuminated by frost crystals set shimmering by thousands of stars, and the frosty moon the Chippewas called Minidoo Geezis, the little spirit moon of early winter. 

I held my breath to hear better and determined that the music was the Christmas carol O Holy Night, and that the notes came from the window in my grandmother’s room. It was open to the cold because most people smoked cigarettes back then, and at gatherings cracked a window to clear the air. They sang the first verse, and when they reached the sixth line, the other voices ceased and one voice carried on alone:

“Fall on your knees! Oh, hear the angel voices! O Niiii . . .iiight Diii…vine! . . . .” That’s the part where the notes rise higher and higher until the singer reaches an awesome pitch.

The solo voice belonged to my grandmother, Louise LaFrance, and I knew she hit that high note while sitting on the edge of the bed that was her prison. She was crippled with limb-twisting rheumatoid arthritis and suffered searing pain and the humiliation of being bedridden, a humiliation that included needing a bedpan to relieve herself and having her son-in-law lift her into the bathtub.

The others stopped singing to listen to her. Each time she hit the high notes at the words ‘O Night Divine’, a shiver danced on my spine.

When she finished singing O Holy Night, the other voices started up again, this time with Silent Night and other favourite carols. I went into the house and found Christmas Eve celebrants – my mom, dad and some neighbours – crowded into the 10-foot by 10-foot bedroom that was my grandmother’s world. They sang long into the night, mostly in French because the neighbours were the Gauthiers who seldom spoke English to my grandmother and mother.

The crippling arthritis had attacked my grandmother not long after my birth sixteen years before. It advanced quickly, twisting her fingers like pretzels, then deforming her ankles and knees. You could see the pain in her eyes and from my bedroom I could hear her moaning in restless sleep, sometimes calling out for relief. 

She took up smoking to ease the pain. Late into the night I would hear her stir, then listen for the scrape of a wooden match against the side of a box of Redbird matches. 

Sometimes I would get up and go to her door and see the red tip of the cigarette glow brightly as she inhaled and I would go in and we would talk in the smoky darkness. Mostly the talk was about growing up and sorting through the conflicts between a teenager and his parents. 

After the singing ended that night, my mother served tourtière, which I slathered with mustard. Then we gathered at the tree and opened our gifts. 

I have long forgotten what gift I got that Christmas. It doesn’t matter. My real gift was an understanding of how that frail, twisted body came to produce such sweet but powerful notes. 

I realized that those high notes were not solely the products of the lungs. They were driven by something stronger than mere flesh. 

They came from an unbreakable spirit, and a relentless will to overcome.

 We tend to think of global warming and climate change as some new development, It’s not. There have been warnings about it going back many decades.

You find the warnings in the oddest places. I’m reading John D, MacDonald’s A Fearful Yellow Eye, his eighth novel in the Travis McGee crime series, and find this passage:

“I could smell a sourness in the wind. I remembered that it blew across a dying lake. For a hundred years the cities had dumped their wastes and corruptions and acids into it, and now suddenly everyone was aghast that it should have the impertinence to start dying like Lake Erie.”

It continues: 

“The ecology was broken, the renewing forces at last overwhelmed. 

“When the sea begins to stink, man better have some fresh green planets to colonize, because this one is going to be used up.”

A mystery novel is an unusual place to find strong environmental statements. But MacDonald was a very vocal activist who often slipped environmental comments into his mysteries. He wrote the Fear Yellow Eye criticism of the environment back in 1966, long before most people got onto the Save the Environment campaign.

Much of MacDonald’s environmental activism was directed at his adopted state of Florida. He fought dredge-and-fill projects, schemes to change the Everglades and was involved in stopping construction of a huge airport in what is now Florida’s Big Cypress Preserve.

Florida is the home of Travis McGee, MacDonald’s fictional beach bum salvage consultant who recovers property for people who have had it taken from them by illegal or unscrupulous means. 

“I’m a high-level Robin Hood,” he says in one book. “I steal from thieves.”

McGee appears in 21 of MacDonald’s novels and has plenty to say about how overdevelopment is ruining our landscapes, especially in Florida. 

In one book he notes: “The rivers and the swamps are dying, the birds are dying, the fish are dying. They’re paving the whole state. And the people who give a damn can’t be heard.”

"The air used to smell like orange blossoms,” MacDonald wrote in 1979. “Now when the wind is right, it smells like a robot's armpit.”

MacDonald has a lot of say about a lot of things, including the greed and corruption that leads people into making bad decisions. But he doesn’t let his (and McGee’s) views on the environment, or society’s wrongs, get in the way of his mysteries. 

His McGee is a hard-boiled investigator with a football player’s physique that he uses to get himself out of tough situations. 

He’s also a thinking person’s investigator – a knight in slightly tarnished armour who has a timeless sense of honour and obligation.  

He doesn’t like the world he sees around him and has retired to his houseboat The Busted Flush, which he won in a poker game. He comes out of retirement when he needs money, charging a fee of 50-per-cent of the value of whatever he recovers.

MacDonald began the McGee series with The Deep Blue Good-By in 1964, partly as a way of calling attention to the ruining of Florida’s natural areas by overdevelopment. He followed that with three more McGee mysteries in the same year.

Fawcett Publications, the American publisher of the paperback McGee mysteries, used to say that it had 32 million McGee books in print. Each title contained a colour to help readers remember which ones they had read.

Good fiction contains important messages, many of which tell us about life. Rarely, however, does crime fiction do this.

MacDonald’s McGee books are not just straight ahead mysteries that get solved.  They are mystery fiction with something more – observations about the things McGee sees around him. Things that he doesn’t like and believes are not good for society. 

Other authors and literary critics have credited the McGee series as helping to create a genre of Florida-based fiction based on ecological and social problems brought on by the huge numbers of people moving there. 

Stephen King, one of the world’s most popular authors, has praised MacDonald as "the great entertainer of our age, and a mesmerizing storyteller." 

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Society’s deep thinkers have varying theories on the three stages of life. Like childhood, adulthood, and old age. Or, learning, working, and teaching.

I discovered a theory of my own the other day while rummaging through my clothes closet. 

The first stage of life is acquiring stuff. Stage two is using the stuff, followed by stage three – getting rid of stuff. 

The last stage is the hardest. I confirmed that while staring into my closet jam packed with stuff I haven’t used in years and might never use again.

I mean how could I possibly discard my collection of neckties, none of which I have worn in years? 

I have some treasured beauties. Power ties, fun ties. Ties that brighten the day. Ties for darker days saddened by funerals.

The most spectacular on my rack is a red and gold checkered tie that likely cost more than all the others combined. It is 100-per-cent pure silk and was a gift from a visiting Korean news executive. 

That’s my favourite necktie but I can’t remember when I last wore it. It turns out that many other folks have not put on a necktie in ages. 
Neckties, I’m told, are out of style despite having been an important feature of men’s dress for a long time. A Gallup poll found that 67 per cent of men no longer wear neckties to work. Another poll found that only six per cent wear a tie on a daily basis.

Neckties traditionally symbolized authority and power. Their history goes back thousands of years.

Egyptian mummies have been found with knotted clothes around their necks. The Egyptians believed that knots held and released magic.

The bodies of ancient Chinese men, plus statues of men, have been found with various neck cloths believed to symbolize the ranks of soldiers.

Later, the French who really liked the idea of neck cloths, made them a high society fashion they called the cravat. As the cravat or necktie gained popularity it was seen as 

a symbol of decorum, elegance, and respect, as well as an opportunity for self-expression.

After the Second World War the military connection with neckties faded greatly and more colours and styles appeared. Wider and louder ties appeared and now ties have a wide variety of colours, patterns and widths. The standard necktie now is 3.5 inches wide and 57 inches long.

For me the most important thing about a necktie is how you knot it. The most common knot is the Four-in-Hand knot, or schoolboy knot, that is relatively small, narrow and not symmetrical.

Early in my childhood my dad taught me how to tie a Windsor knot, which is triangular, wider, symmetrical and said to project confidence.

My dad and other men of his era would not be happy to see how ties are knotted these days, no matter what knot is used. They lived in times when neckties were carefully tied, snugged neat against the top of the collar and never left loosely sloppy.

Today neckties seem to be worn as an afterthought. They often are sloppily tied, knots crookedly below unbuttoned collars. Bottom tie tip hanging below the belt line.

Ties serve no real purpose these days. The ways people view each other have changed, so more casual dress probably makes sense.

However, guys wearing ties remain a big attraction for women. A recent study by well-known American psychologist C. Nathan DeWall found that women still love to see men in neckties, either at work or at social events

An earlier study reported that 72 per cent of women are turned on when a man wears a necktie on a date.

Although I’ve reached that third stage of life when I should be disposing of all sorts of unused stuff, I think I’ll hang on to my neckties. You never know when they might make a comeback.

As Lee Iacocca, the now deceased former Ford Motor Company president, once said: 

“When neckties went from narrow to wide, I kept all my old ones until the style went back to narrow.”

Some people are unhappy with the growing number of retailers getting rid of self-checkouts. I am not.

Self-checkouts don’t pay income tax. They don’t contribute to social insurance plans and pensions. They don’t earn wages for people to buy groceries to take home to their families.

Self-checkouts eliminate jobs and the good things that jobs give us.

Also, they symbolize a trend that is corrupting our lives. That’s the trend to do things faster – hurry to where you are going; hurry to get things done. Hurry, hurry, hurry. 

There’s even a name for it: Hurry Sickness or Hurry Syndrome. It is a sickness because it creates irritability with anything or anyone that slows things down. It can damage your health and relationships with family and friends.

You see it more and more these days, notably on the highways. Impatient drivers passing cars on hills and curves, ignoring the blind spots where another vehicle could be coming straight at them.

You see it on the streets and in the shopping malls.

One of my daughters and her husband were subjected to someone’s impatience at a retail store on Remembrance Day. They were at a staffed checkout when the clock struck 11 a.m. and they stopped putting their goods on the conveyor belt and stood heads down for a minute of silence.

An angry customer yelled at them to get moving because they were holding up the customer line. Imagine, slowing everything down just to remember those who sacrificed their lives for us!

A growing number of customers are unhappy with self-checkouts. That customer backlash, plus concerns about mechanical issues and theft, have some major retailers rethinking self-checkouts.

Booths, major United Kingdom grocery chain, is removing most of its self-checkouts. Costco, Walmart and some other big American chains have been considering reducing their number of self-checkouts.

“Our customers have told us this over time — that the self-scan machines that we’ve got in our stores … can be slow, they can be unreliable (and) they’re obviously impersonal,” Booths managing director Nigel Murray said in a  BBC interview.

Self-service machines were first introduced during the 1980s to lower labor expenses. They shifted the work of paid employees to unpaid customers and their use expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Besides mechanical issues and customer complaints, retailers with self-service machines are seeing higher merchandise losses from customer errors and intentional shoplifting. 

Last year a study of 93 retailers across the globe estimated that 23 per-cent their store losses were related to self-checkouts. An earlier study found that self-service lanes had a loss rate for four per-cent, more than double the industry average for loss.

Glitches in self-checkout systems can tempt people to cheat. Some products have barcodes that don’t scan properly and a customer simply bags the item without bothering to confirm it scanned. Or, a customer might type in a wrong code by mistake and not bother to rescan the item at the proper price.

Some self-checkout theft is deliberate. For instance customers have been known to take the sticker off a cheaper item and place it over one that is more expensive.

For instance, there is the banana trick in which you take the $2 tag off a banana and place it over the $17.99-a-pound steak.

There is no question that self-checkouts can be convenient and save time. Retailers have been working on ways to reduce annoying glitches and to reduce theft.

One thing they will not reduce, however, is the fact that self-checkouts are taking away jobs. There is concern that getting your groceries through self-checkouts will spread to other items.

Imagine seeing a car you like and being satisfied with its options and price, so you simply scan the windshield sticker, write a cheque and drive off. No sales staff required. 

That’s not an impossibility. 

Despite its problems, self-checkout is expected to become the norm. Industry insiders have estimated that the global self-service checkout market will almost double to $5.9 billion by 2026.

One example: Ontario car buyers no longer have to go to a Service Ontario office to register a vehicle. Car dealers now can register vehicles online, and issue ownership permits and licence plates to buyers on the spot.