Of Christmas as long, long ago is my new book arriving for the 2025 Christmas season.

Find out what Christmas was like centuries ago.

Sneak preview, it was weird, and spooky, and rowdy.

Kind of gross sometimes.

Find it wherever books are sold in hardcover from Lions Press and audiobook from recorded books. It's Christmas as you've never

seen it before, and it makes a great gift. I'm Brian Earle. This is Christmas Past.

It was the week before Christmas in 1917 when a young man named Walter in Halifax, Nova Scotia,

sat down to write a letter to his pen pal Harold in Stoughton, Massachusetts.

How and why they came to be pen pals is lost to history, but it wouldn't have been unusual.

The Maritime provinces and New England, or the Boston states,

as many maritimeers once called them, had long been tied by shared waters, migration, and trade.

Boston and Halifax, in particular, each a harbor city facing the Atlantic, each a colonial

outpost turned cornerstone of its nation's story.

Despite the date on the calendar, Walter's letter wasn't to wish Harold the greetings of the season.

It was to tell him what had happened.

Canada had entered the Great War three years prior. America had just entered it that spring.

And Halifax, those separated from the trenches by an ocean, had experienced a catastrophe of such scale that even the farthest corners

of the world would take notice. Walter's letter spoke of a city shaken to its foundation,

of lives lost and homes leveled, of a harbor town reduced

in minutes to ash and memory. But it also spoke of a friendship, of the city that came to

Halifax's aid, of one Bostonian who, in Walter's words, became the hero of dear old Halifax.

During the war, Halifax had become a vital artery of the Allied war effort,

...