Christmas pipes

Pictured in banner above: the first three Peterson Christmas pipes, from 2009 – 2011   Santa’s Little Helpers, the 304 Christmas pipe 2019 Almost every year during Advent or the first week of Christmas, we read or listen to Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, which against all odds hit the book stalls on December 19, 1843.  It was a personal statement for Dickens and one his publishers weren’t much interested in.  If you’ve seen The Man Who Invented Christmas (2017), you’ve got a fairly accurate portrait of the state of the author’s finances and family, the social frictions and inner frissons that propelled him.  Like everyone else in this world, he was a complex and often troubled person. Through it all, he seemed to get the most important things right, and I’m convinced one of them was Christmas. I framed The X Pipe with Christmas stories—one back several decades and one a few years ago, hoping to show the distance we need to travel from disenchantment to wonder, from despair to hope.  One of the best tools I know for that journey is—and I see you’ve anticipated me—a good pipe and a quiet place to smoke. Irish Times, December 1917 Enter Kapp & Peterson’s Christmas commemorative.  While Christmas was always an important time in Peterson’s early history (judging from the number of ads placed in Irish papers) the notion of an annual pipe commemorating the season arrived only 15 years ago, a decade after the introduction of the Pipe of the Year and the St. Patrick’s Day pipes.* Understandable, of course, given the great change in pipe smoking that had occurred as it went from the everyday practice of Everyman to the selected practice of hobbyists and contemplatives. 2009 When the first Christmas pipe appeared, it was—according to my best recollection—housed in an oversized red box with lid (white velvet inside) with a Christmas tree on it. Inside was the B33, one of the sextet of great River Collection shapes (2007), an inverted Christmas tree (if you will) with a metal mount (whether of nickel or sterling I cannot say) with laser-engraved Christmas tree and hot foil silver P on vulcanite F/T stem. It was the kind of pipe we’d expect Ebenezer Scrooge to have received from his nephew Fred.  I’m sure we can imagine this particular Christmas as the kind of Christmas still fully informed by Ebenezer’s resolution at the beginning of Stave 5 when he awoke from the final visitation:             YES! AND THE BEDPOST was his own. The bed was his own, the room was his own. Best and happiest of all, the Time before him was his own, to make amends in!             “I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!” Scrooge repeated, as he scrambled out of bed. “The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. O Jacob Marley! Heaven, and the Christmas Time be praised for this!” 2010 However much we may think the Spirits of Christmas Past, Present, and Future…