Originally published in Countryside Post, Issue 1.13.
Last week was a bit too soon for me to announce “The Countryside”—which was where we were gonna stick a bunch of neat stuff, such as ancedotes and photos from people in our countryside. The first one will be in the next issue.
The delay is my fault. Regular features need development time, and Thanksgiving kinda got in the way. Besides which, I’m sure all of you were too busy with Thanksgiving preparations to even think of sending stuff to the paper.
Besides that, you probably don’t know what to contribute to this “Countryside” thing. That’s understandable. I didn’t give you an example to work from. I’ll describe it this way: Let’s say you’ve got something which doesn’t appear to be news, but is kinda interesting. Fr’instance, someone you know won $20 in the lottery. Or the rain created a puddle in your lawn and you found ducks in it, so you took a photo. Or your son gave himself a lopsided haircut. Or you found some old Civil War era letters in the attic.
In other words, if it’s news to you, send it in. And if it’s news you think others would be interested in, send it in. And even if it isn’t news anymore, but it’s interesting history that relates to something recent, send it in. I don’t think any of us are really gonna know what this feature is going to look like until the stuff comes in, but we’ll see, won’t we?
…Yeesh, I use the word “Xmas” once and somebody accused me of taking the Christ out of Christmas. If you knew anything about the origin of the word Xmas, you’d know it’s pronounced “Christmas,” not “Ex-mas.” The X is the Greek letter chi, which stands for Christ, used in the early days of Christianity when the Christian scriptures were only in Greek and copies had to be made by hand. I wish more Christians knew their history—they might be more appreciative of the traditions they either ignore or overreact to. Especially during the time of year Christ was born.
—Kent Leslie, managing editor
Update, 11/17/2009: Lots of newspapers have a People column. They give it some whimsical name; in The Dixon Newspaper we called it “Out and About,” and in another paper it was “News and Notes,” but you get the idea. It’s where people who have achieved minor accomplishments—graduating from college, getting a merit badge, winning an award in their particular trade, celebrating a 20th anniversary, catching a 50-pound trout—get a blurb in the paper. Their accomplishment wasn’t large enough to get them a full article, but it’s important to them and should get some recognition, right?
Anyway, most of the time this column is handed off to either the town gossip or the staff kook—the reporter who wears the outrageous hats, or the publisher’s cousin who’s managed to never be fired despite an inability to do anything else—or it’s handed off to the lowest reporter on the totem pole. It’s almost invariably a woman. I don’t say this to be sexist; I know some very gossipy men. But for whatever reason, People columnists are predominantly female.
I wanted a People column but I didn’t want any of our local gossips to do it. I felt, in their cases, the power would go to their heads, and if you know anything about the history of gossip columnists, it’s rare that this didn’t happen—they’d use the People column to grind their ax, or promote their friends, or only write about the “cool” people in the community—if you remember high school, small towns can run exactly the same way. I didn’t want our People column to be gossipy, and I wanted to include all the fun weird stuff that I was already putting in the Post. Our collector friend’s discoveries, fr’instance, were perfect for it. Trivia about Nevada County could go there. Vacation photos, family anecdotes, entertaining objets d’art—I wanted it to be about all the bric-a-brac in our lives, and call it “The Countryside.”
And nobody ever did figure out what I was talking about, and sent me little to nothing. I tried a few times, but no dice. Not that I really had the regular space to put it in. But it would have been awesome.
The issue over the term “Xmas” is a peeve of mine. Far too many people think it’s a secular bastardization of “Christmas,” including the pastor of the church I was attending at this time (I was new to the area, and was still church-shopping). You’d think he, being an educated Christian, would know better, but he denounced “Xmas” as “taking Christ out of Christmas,” and oddly enough it wasn’t even this stupidity that led me away from going to his church.
Anyway. When I was finally critiqued for using the abbreviation casually in my previous column, I threw in this explanation, then made a point of using “Xmas” way too often. Looking back at it, though, I should have been more gracious about it. Most people just don’t know any better.