Season’s greetings for Christmas 2025 and New Year’s 2026 from Thistle Ha’. As we enjoy the peacefulness of an early winter and the warm comfort of home, we are spending Christmastime with family and friends. We hope you, too, are cherishing the many joys of the season.
Christmas here is following a familiar pattern. This year, we are staying home on Christmas Day. Kristin, Chris and Felicity spent the weekend before Christmas with Kristin’s family in London and Brampton. They will complete their visits with Kristin’s family on the weekend following Christmas in Kingston.
In late January, Chris and Jim attended a federal government event where then Transport Minister Anita Anand announced without apology that the Pickering airport project was being abandoned after 53 years. She said that the title of the “vast majority” of “high value conservation lands” would be transferred from Transport Canada to the Parks Canada agency and added to the Rouge National Urban Park. Transport Canada is conducting a series of consultations to determine how its remaining Pickering Lands (https://tc.canada.ca/en/initiatives/pickering-lands) are to be used. Consultations are underway with First Nations, federal, provincial and municipal ministries and agencies. “Public consultations” will occur in early 2026. Senator Black is among many arguing that the remaining natural habitat and actively cropped farmlands must be protected from urban expansion (https://landoverlandings.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Letter-to-PM-Minister-and-Parks-Canada-re-Pickering-Federal-Lands-December-9-2025.pdf). We are also involved in the “Bring Back Brougham” campaign to restore the Brougham community by rebuilding the houses and business structures destroyed by the federal government over the last half-century (https://landoverlandings.com/bring-back-brougham).
After celebrating the cancellation of the Pickering airport project, we paused to reflect on the significant loss, hurt, and anguish this bad idea has caused our community and local economy. It has permanently scarred the lives of our friends, neighbours, and the Miller family (https://digitalarchive.tpl.ca/objects/373364/chairman-hugh-miller-right-addresses-north-pickering-ratep). In 1972, federal decision-makers mistakenly decided that building Pickering airport urgently was a strategically important national project. Pursuit of similar nation-building projects is guiding federal policy today. We pray that this time, wiser choices will be made.
It’s been an infrastructure year at Thistle Ha’ this year. We got an early start last Christmas. If you recall from our 2024 message, we had a new power line installed to the house after a contractor accidentally tore the old one down.
Since Kristin, Chris and Felicity are planning to renovate their own separate living space here, we had to upgrade our utilities to accommodate the needs of two families. The house water well, dug in the 1850s, couldn’t produce enough water during recent prolonged summer dry spells, so we had a new well drilled during the spring. Our century-old septic bed was replaced with a two-family capacity system in August. Our furnace had to be replaced in November; we decided to replace it with a heat pump, using a natural gas furnace as backup.
Felicity started junior kindergarten in September. At her age, clambering up the school bus steps is a big challenge, but she is quickly adapting to her school routines. She continues to swim, hike, have fun with her friends and accompany her grandmother around the farm. She keeps all of us entertained with her endless imaginative games and stories.
For the first time since 2019, Charlotte and I had a brief holiday in July. We went to Stratford and saw two plays. For fun, we saw Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. For Shakespeare, we saw As You Like It; its story of the grim despair of those in political exile is all too real these days. Chris and Kristin got away on a 4-day trip to explore their old haunts in Montréal in October.
We had an unusually prolonged dry spell at Thistle Ha’ this summer — from June 21 to August 21, we had about 5 centimetres (2 inches) of rain, far lower than our normal 20 centimetres. Nonetheless, the rains we had were timely; so, we had abundant crops of most garden vegetables, herbs, apples, potatoes, and a record year for sweet potato production (sweet potatoes love the summer heat). Despite the dry spell, Ron Tapscott’s corn crop was also shockingly good, averaging close to 200 bushels per acre. Ron said our place produced the best crop of any land he farmed this year. Difficult weather prolonged the fall harvest; combining wasn’t finished here until December 19. They say it’s a long harvest when you’re listening to Christmas carols on the combine radio.
We send you our warmest Christmas greetings and very best wishes for a safe, healthy and happy 2026.
