Feeling a bit frazzled?

By COLLIN GALLANT on December 24, 2022.

cgallant@medicinehatnews.com@CollinGallant

That’s normal. Or it used to be, and didn’t we spend two years getting back to here?

Of course, stress at the Holidays is a real thing, unwelcome and unhealthy.

The price of everything is up. Major travel seems to be worse than ever. After Christmas 2020 and 2021 were turned on their heads, maybe there is stress to make this one a real blockbuster.

Those same Holidays hopefully showed that simple can be special, and no big to-do can outshine what’s most important or held most closely.

Keep “too much to do, too little time” in perspective this year when you blast out the door to find an onion or last minute gift or to pick up a relative.

It’s much better than trying to find a COVID test kit on Dec. 24.

Remember that?

Full house

A column earlier this month described the hustle and bustle at the News offices now that we host the Santa Claus Fund. That work is done for now for the year (a host of other efforts continue to lend a helping hand to Hatters), but the office seems a bit too quiet.

What’s better than a busy house at Christmas?

Maybe it’s the fact we went from summer to the dead of winter in November, but the season seems compressed.

Nowadays, only one in 10 houses seems to have Christmas lights these days, but the one house seems to have lights enough for a dozen.

Dec. 25 on a weekend, really sets bookends on Christmas week, and really only seven days of holiday songs on the radio.

Yes, there is a lingering controversy about department stores playing carols before Remembrance Day

Yuletide fables tend to dwell on extending the Christmas spirit into the new year, but perhaps we should start earlier instead?

Saving the day

Christmas came early when a local real estate office apparently reversed a decision to hand out a very particular daytimer popular among a certain segment of Hatters. You know the type: they mark out a year’s worth of birthdays and anniversaries on Boxing Day, laying pen to fresh paper (blips and cellphone alerts, simply will not do).

This high demand diaries were handed out for years by retired realtor Glyn Yuhas, but Rod Wilson’s office has taken over the practice. (By the way, a special Merry Christmas goes to Glyn’s mom, Marilyn, who called and left a cheery message last month when this column got a little too gloomy.)

How it works

The word was “frazzled,” not “frozen,” but home heating is a popular topic.

One thing I learned this year is that pink insulation – an excellent last-minute stocking stuffer – is so coloured because of iron content in the low-grade sand used to make fibre glass.

Another is how a heat pump works. It’s basically a reverse air conditioner, but folks get tripped up wondering how air well below zero could heat a home during the winter.

Well… imagine two glasses of room temperature water. Each are about 20C, and logically, you have the same amount of heat energy if one was at the freezing point and the other 40C. Now take one to minus-60C, and the other reaches the boiling point.

For a heat pump furnace, this happens via an electric-powered radiator, though the colder one side is, the harder it has to work.

The limit is Absolute Zero, which is -273C and can be experienced at the Methanex Bowl during high school football playoffs.

A look ahead

Monday is Boxing Day, and 2022 winds down this week without much on the official calendar other than to anxiously await the local “newsmaker” and “news event” of 2022. Any guesses?

100 years ago

A meditation on News editorial pages on Dec. 23, 1922:

“As the genial Chinook overcomes the wintry frost and brings a passing semblance of spring, so too, the Christmas spirit melts even the most frozen heart; the winter of discontent is converted into the summer of beneficence and under the spell of that glowing spirit trials, tribulations and hardships take on a different hue.

Never is the spirit of brotherhood more in evidence than during the Yuletide Season, the celebration of the birth of the founder of Christianity… He brought to humanity the Golden Rule.

But as the effect of the Chinook is but temporary and with its passing comes again the rigours of winter, the close of the Christmas season also sees the lessening of goodwill and people lapse once more into indifference. (The realization) that each man is his brother’s keeper is the hope of civilization.”

Collin Gallant covers city politics and a variety of topics for the News. Reach him (after the Holiday) at 403-528-5664 or via email at cgallant@medicinehatnews.com

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