When “1917” won a Golden Globe for Best Picture on January 5, emcee Ricky Gervais commanded the awards ceremony audience in the Beverley Hilton and the millions watching in TV land, “You must see this movie!”

Now Muskokans are obeying Gervais’s order at Bracebridge’s Norwood, one of Canada’s first-run movie houses showing this World War I movie for its two-week debut. Others can fall in at Huntsville’s Capitol Theatre where 1917 will then continue its inaugural Muskoka screening. As I can attest from the premier on January 10, the experience is potent and uncommon.

The digital revolution transforming culture, economies, and society touches smallest details. With another year-end now over, did you get as many Christmas cards as 20, or even 5, years ago?

Their dramatic fall-off is accounted for only slightly by the disappearing generations for whom sending cards was normal, expected, and pleasing. Folks’ excessive busyness with their personal lives is no big factor, either. The culprit is digital communication replacing prior patterns. More people today think it cleverer, cheaper, and convenient for an automated email marketing service to deliver what Canada Post once did.

This Christmas I received more on-screen greetings than ones by mail carriers or friends dropping off their card at the door. The paper-printed cards, being fewer, became all the more welcome. Yearly photos of a family, like pencil lines with dates and names on a kitchen doorframe, are happy tracers of human growth. An envelope’s return address helps update contacts for acquaintances. A few brief lines convey news and revive emotional connections. Bundling this eclectic trove of artworks preserves for posterity evidence of human lives and glimpses of Canadian culture.

Parry Sound and Muskoka districts, like Ontario’s other sub-units for local government, have been subject to constant study and intermittent change. For awhile, it seemed 2019 was to have been a year of significant overhaul.

In 2018 newly-elected Premier Doug Ford had briskly cut Toronto Council’s seats in half, a good decision badly timed because our capital city’s municipal elections were already underway. Then in July the premier cancelled Muskokans direct election of District Council chair, despite three candidates already campaigning, by pledging a much grander overhaul of Muskoka’s two-tier local government structure instead. The “One Muskoka” goal, with its positive implications for Parry Sound, seemed imminent.

Because any change in the structural design of our local government must take place at the provincial level, and because most public office holders ride the bronco rather than tame it, we’d entered, it seemed, a moment of historic destiny: Doug Ford would happily do unpopular things for the benefit, as he said, of “the people.”

As January 1 Election Day looms, voters across Parry Sound, Muskoka, and the rest of Ontario are now pondering reeve/mayor and councillor prospects for the coming 12 months.

There’s a lot to be said, for both council and citizens alike, in starting each year with a refreshed mandate. A January 1 election achieves for local government what a New Year’s resolution accomplishes for individuals: a close look forward, a plan to improve, a renegotiated “contract” to replace lacklustre performance with better future results.

Renewing an electoral mandate at the start of a year enables us to mark report cards when still remembering how each representative, indeed council as a whole, scored over the preceding 12 months. Because political party structure and discipline are absent at the municipal level, each councillor is effectively freelancing. Thus it is essential for citizens to hold their reins, to keep a reasonable link between performances in office and evaluations at the polling booth. Can you imagine keeping track of all the shifting positions, policy reversals, and conflicting votes for years on end? Real accountability would be impossible.

In 1641, when French Jesuit missionary Jean de Brebeuf wrote Canada’s first Christmas carol, today’s Parry Sound and Muskoka boundaries did not exist and Indigenous peoples throughout this region occupied the wide catchment area of “Saint Marie-among-the-Hurons” colony on Georgian Bay’s coast, near today’s Midland.

T’was in the moon of wintertime when all the bird’s had fled

That mighty Gichi Manitou sent angel choirs instead.

Before their light the stars grew dim and wandering hunter’s heard the hymn:

“Jesus your king is born, Jesus is born; in excelsis Gloria!”

In the Northern Iroquoian language of the Huron/Wendat peoples, Brebeuf took literary licence to taper religious beliefs to local conditions. The imagery is certainly more appealing.

More and more, politicians openly pander to the so-called “middle-class.” This year’s national election, like last year’s provincial campaign, saw local candidates and party leaders blandish a costly array of tax cuts and new programs to benefit our suffering “middle class.”

Politicians today bribe those who do not need help because they constitute the richest vein for mining votes: some 50 to 70 percent of Canadians self-identify to pollsters as “middle class.” I’ve long viewed a member of Canada’s middle-class as someone able to look after herself or himself. Generally, this is thanks to being well-educated, well-off financially, and well-connected socially. The rich can sure look after themselves -- mostly by calling their lawyer, accountant, or a buddy in the Senate or cabinet. The people I believe need a hand-up from government are neither of those, but Canadians at society’s margins.

One of the great advantages of the New World was escaping the class structure of Old Europe. The American Dream embraced rising to the top based on merit, not on social status, and the U.S. Constitution embodies those principles. The Canadian dream was, and remains, more muted because the British Empire’s values and institutions held sway here.

Many factors make our communities economically dynamic, culturally integrated, and socially alive. Common to them all is the power of local support. Floats in our Santa Claus parades just now, you’ve perhaps noticed, are by local businesses and community organizations – not the distant Amazons and Wayfares that drain Muskoka money and kill local jobs. That’s the reason for the punchy message on the Huntsville radio station’s marquee: SHOP LOCAL, AMAZON DOESN’T SPONSOR YOUR KID’S HOCKEY TEAM.

Hunter’s Bay Radio echoes what Muskoka’s community newspapers have preached since their inception. Here’s what Muskoka longest-running newspaper said a century ago, under the headline “Little things to remember for a Live Community.”