Watching cities rise before me, then behind me sink again
At first we couldn't figure out why there would be mounted Boston police in front of the Omni Parker House on Tremont Street, especially in company of city officials and Mounties in dress uniform. Then we couldn't figure out why Boston Common was covered with crowds and corporate sponsors and considerably more in the way of security. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch confirmed that it was Saint Andrew's Day, which maybe accounted for all the pipers, but maybe not. The penny finally dropped that we were attending the annual lighting of the Boston Christmas tree, this year commemorating the centenary of the Halifax Explosion and the aid Boston extended, in recompense for which the province of Nova Scotia gifted the city of Boston a significant tree for Christmas in 1918 and has continued the tradition every year since 1971. We watched the ceremony open with a performance by American and Canadian pipers and then there was a lot of Christmas pop and smokers behind us wherever we went and there seemed an insufficient percentage of CanCon in the festivities (I would have led with both national anthems, not just ours—it's an international event, come on) and the tree-lighting itself was an hour and half away and Rob got tired of me shouting "Just sing 'Northwest Passage'!" so we caught the Red Line from Park Street and fed the cats as soon as we got home and made biscuits for ourselves with milk gravy and the ground goat we had bought earlier that evening at the public market, a life decision I can enthusiastically recommend. And maybe there was more from Nova Scotia and less from Boston later on, but I think we would have needed to plan to spend the evening on Boston Common to find out. Here is Nathan Rogers singing "Northwest Passage" with Dry Bones in 2014. I hope people in this city remember the origins of their tree.
spatch confirmed that it was Saint Andrew's Day, which maybe accounted for all the pipers, but maybe not. The penny finally dropped that we were attending the annual lighting of the Boston Christmas tree, this year commemorating the centenary of the Halifax Explosion and the aid Boston extended, in recompense for which the province of Nova Scotia gifted the city of Boston a significant tree for Christmas in 1918 and has continued the tradition every year since 1971. We watched the ceremony open with a performance by American and Canadian pipers and then there was a lot of Christmas pop and smokers behind us wherever we went and there seemed an insufficient percentage of CanCon in the festivities (I would have led with both national anthems, not just ours—it's an international event, come on) and the tree-lighting itself was an hour and half away and Rob got tired of me shouting "Just sing 'Northwest Passage'!" so we caught the Red Line from Park Street and fed the cats as soon as we got home and made biscuits for ourselves with milk gravy and the ground goat we had bought earlier that evening at the public market, a life decision I can enthusiastically recommend. And maybe there was more from Nova Scotia and less from Boston later on, but I think we would have needed to plan to spend the evening on Boston Common to find out. Here is Nathan Rogers singing "Northwest Passage" with Dry Bones in 2014. I hope people in this city remember the origins of their tree.
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I didn't know that about your family!
I hope your great-grandfather was all right.
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I don't actually know how my great-grandfather fared -- I want to say he was deafened but survived but I'm not entirely certain. Maybe I"ll get to ask someday :}
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It looks as though your grandmother would not have been the only Haligonian to move to Massachusetts in the aftermath of the explosion. I hope there is a way to find out the rest of the story someday.