The Holidays

The holiday season can get kind of layered around here. We have friends and relations of different faiths, or no faith at all—which is fine too. I suppose religion is baked into the season one way or another, though. I imagine that the derivation of ‘holiday’ comes from the notion of holy days. When I think of this my heart goes out to the generations of people for whom the only rest from work and drudgery was a holy day, devoted to some saint or other. When you think about it, these days really were devoted to the saint du jour, and not to the exhausted labourers, and the church probably expected the time to be spent in worship and thanksgiving. I’m reminded of the workers who built the great cathedrals of the middle ages. These artisans would work from daybreak to dusk on their great architectural monuments to religious faith—carving their notion of the biblical stories, raising arches as their way of expressing glory, and glazing windows with lead and coloured glass to educate their community in the faith. Every now and then they would get a ‘holiday’ so they could worship. Some of these cathedrals took decades and even centuries to complete, which meant that almost none of the workers who spent their lives on the building would see the finished edifice. 

It reminds me what an extraordinarily privileged life I’ve led. My earliest memories of holidays generally involved the seaside. These days I often see the hard packed racing-ready stretches of Daytona Beach, but back then it was the crab-filled tidal pools of the Firth of Forth, a sort of fiord off the North Sea near Edinburgh. Sometimes we went to nearby North Berwick. Someone had built a low wall on the shore which created a swimming pool full of seawater at every high tide. 

I hadn’t a clue back then that North Berwick played an important part in the witchcraft craze that doomed so many mentally ill, and simply innocent women to death in the 16th and 17th centuries. A group of local women were accused of conjuring the sinking of the king’s ship in bad weather. How would you like to be the pro bono defence attorney assigned to that case?

Later in my childhood my family drove down to Scarborough, a seaside town in Yorkshire. That’s where I learned to swim, buoyed up by the salt water. We stayed in a small hotel above a pond-like lake, and you had to descend a charming path through leafy gardens to get to the water. There you could rent row boats and canoes which, ironically, were named after Canadian provinces. I’m surprised I remember that, because back then I was barely aware that Canada existed. 

There was a naval battle fought early in the Second World War between a German battleship and three allied cruisers which ended when the battleship was forced to scuttle itself in a South American harbour. The people who ran the tourist business in Scarborough had managed to recreate the famous Battle of the River Plate (Rio de la Plata) on the big pond using radio-controlled model ships, complete with gun flashes and smoke. I don’t suppose that would be a big deal these days, but it impressed the hell out of a young Scottish kid raised on stories of the war.

The battleship was large enough that there was supposed to be someone lying down inside the model, steering the vessel. I don’t know if that was true, but I love the idea. To a kid with an electric train set, having your own battleship and riding inside, was a fantastic dream. Fortunately, the poor man crammed inside the doomed ship didn’t have to blow himself up and sink. He just steered his vessel behind a small copse of trees onshore and somebody let off a smoke bomb. Such fun!

These days holidays and work days sort of blend into one. I suppose writing supernatural mystery novels is some people’s idea of work, but for me, sitting at home with a coffee telling stories is a kind of escape. I don’t have an ocean close at hand, but I have a lake, and when the sun goes down, the shore is enlivened with the heroes and villains of my own imaginings.

Sitting on a sunny ocean beach sipping Pinã Coladas while I tap away at my laptop is a refinement of this fantasy. It’s not really practical though; I’d get a bad sunburn, and I’d need a bar tender. And a port-o-potty. On balance, it’s probably better to nurture a fantasy in which I don’t get sand in my shorts.