More Lights in Masonry - Masons Decorate for Holidays

by Christopher Hodapp

Our annual road trip caravan to Southern California to visit family is in full holiday mode this week, as you might guess from our aluminum yuletide decor. In perusing Reddit today, I came across a couple of Masonic halls festooned with festive holiday decor. It’s a relatively inexpensive (and annually reusable) way to call attention to your temple.

Mount Ararat Lodge in Bel Air, Maryland (above) claims to have 50,000 twinkling Christmas lights decorating their building, more than Rockefeller Center’s tree in New York, and more than twice as many as Clark W. Griswald’s house.

Trinity Lodge 163 in Newport, Kentucky, posted by u/ratebigrob 

Back in 2017, historic St. John’s Lodge No. 1 in Mountain Lakes, NJ participated in the local Christmas Home Tour. If your Masonic hall is even remotely historic, architecturally significant, or just plain situated in a neighborhood with these types of tour events, tie in an open house so that the community has the opportunity to come in and find out just what it is we do and what we stand for. Perhaps offer coffee, hot cider, and hot chocolate to the public and give them a rest from wandering your town in the cold.

Masonic Park and Youth Camp in Tampa, Florida (photo above) sets up an annual drive-through holiday light display. And many state Masonic retirement homes decorate their campuses with nighttime lighting displays.

Meanwhile, my sister and brother-in-law live near Newport Beach in Orange County, California, which is home to one of the oldest and largest Christmas ‘boat parades’ in America. Waterfront houses around the harbor are decorated with lights, along with scores of boats large and small. Everything from two-person launches up to huge yachts and even a massive ferry are covered in lights and process in a line up and down the twisting shore. Some are owned by individuals or  sailing clubs, while others are commercial/corporate vessels. A few local community groups were sponsors or participants in the illuminated flotilla. This would be a golden opportunity for a Masonic district  or group of lodges to band together and create their own floating entry.

Is your lodge or Masonic hall doing anything special for the Christmas holiday season? Pass it along and I’ll update this post. Send to hodapp@aol.com

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Updated 12/21/21 4:31AM

RW David Catten, Past Master of Dewitt Clinton Lodge in Sandwich, Massachusetts, reports that their lodge, a former Methodist church built in 1847, shines for the season. It has been the lodge’s home since 1913.

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Merry Christmas

Back between 2005 and 2008, I was asked to contribute to my brother-in-law's monthly Texas organic gardening magazine, Living Natural First. As I protested at the time,  I didn't know the first dang thing about organic gardening, which was just fine with Bobby. He wanted some lighter relief from the rest of the magazine's monthly dose of compost, leaf mold remedies, and the gardener's astrology chart. The result was an ongoing column entitled Pilgrim's Progress: Rustic Tales of an Organic Greenhorn. The Pilgrim columns generally followed the fictional story of a couple who move to the country from the city – he was an urban creature who couldn't tell which end of a hammer to use to properly twist a screw into a wall, while she was a child of the 60s, completely enthralled with living her utopian vision of an environmentally healthy lifestyle on pennies a month. Together they fought the battle of garden slugs, home improvement, industrial tool rentals and marauding rodents.

After two years or so, I had tried to back out of the column, which apparently resulted in an insurrection from a group of Baptist church ladies in Wichita Falls who gathered every month specifically to read the monthly Pilgrim story aloud to each other. They telephoned Bob to say that if I didn't come up with a Christmas story that year, my eternal soul was at risk of being negatively testified against at Peter's Gate by these otherwise kind and compassionate ladies. The result of their threats is presented below, in lieu of any actual Masonic items.

A very Merry Christmas to all.

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A Pilgrim Christmas Tree

My father is not a cheapskate. Let’s just get that clear right up front, before my significant helpmate shouts, “He is too!” from the next room. My father is a child of the Great Depression, when that hearty stock of gritty survivalists baked their own bread made from dirt they dug from the back yard, walked 28 miles to school every day uphill, both ways, and gave birth to their children in mangers because there was no room in the inn. Er, wait … I think I’m mixing up my stories here.

My father inculcated in the child that sprung from his parsimonious loins a healthy admiration for frugality, placed in a delicate cosmic balance with the sentimental, resulting in what I like to think of as a proper state of mind when it comes to arguments over spending too much money at Christmastime. Over the years, I have neatly ducked the undoubtedly environmentally sound protestations of my bride who has suggested the purchase of a prefabricated Christmas tree every holiday season since we were first tethered together in connubial bliss. The first hints usually begin long about August.

“Hey look,” she’ll hey from a corner of the living room, “I’m still picking up pine needles from last year.” 

I myself regard this as the gift that keeps on giving the whole year through, a gentle reminder of the Christmas spirit, even in the scorching, humid heat of the summer doldrums.

“Uh-huh,” she’ll respond. “I remember now. The vacuum cleaner clogged and tore a belt on all those needles when I was cleaning up after your tree last year.” 

I generally respond to this assault on my coniferous preferences by blurting out a bar of O’ Tannenbaum. I prefer the German lyrics. It gives my retort the proper sense of “I’m not buying a plastic tree, and this is final,” in a way that only the guttural consonants of the German language can really communicate:

O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum,
Dein Kleid will mich was lehren:
Die Hoffnung und Beständigkeit
Gibt Mut und Kraft zu jeder Zeit!

It’s the sort of heartwarming lyric I can imagine Erwin Rommel barking at his wife when she suggested an artificial tree to him, as he was headed out the door to Libya to go command the Afrika Korps.

Long about September, she’ll take the opportunity to wander past my desk and casually make an offhand remark about how the average acre of uncut pines and firs generates enough oxygen every day to keep 18 people breathing, or that 21 million trees were mercilessly hacked down in the prime of life last year, and that if every American man was as shamelessly pigheaded about Christmas trees as me, 446,996 acres of trees would be whacked down. At 18 people’s daily oxygen, per acre, I’d be personally responsible for suffocating 8,045,928 of my fellow citizens. Of course, if that includes the lady who cut in line in front of me at the grocery with 215 items in the ‘12 or Less’ lane, armed with a suitcase filled with expired coupons, that would be okay by me.

Come November, there’s no avoiding the artificial tree display at the Hardware Hut, where all of these wire and plastic mockeries of the yuletide season stand, like some arboreal firing squad. “A snap to put up in less than five minutes!” they coo. “No mess, no fuss!” they taunt. “Look! I’m even pre-lit!” teases the latest phony fir, as its fake fronds beckon the holiday shopper, appealing to his weakening resolve with a can of evergreen-scented air freshener, included at no extra charge. Like some scantily-clad temptress, whispering in his ear, they display their tainted wares and attempt to seduce him. “Take me to your house, honey. I look like the real thing. No one will ever know. I’ll even make it easy on you when you’re tired of me after New Year’s Eve. You can pack me up when you’ve finished with me, and put me away, and not even think of me till next year. Because I’ll wait for you, baby.”

No dice. I’m not buying. Which brings me back to the recombinant cheapskate gene I allegedly inherited from my father. Because, you see, not only am I not buying an artificial tree made by Chinese prisoners in a “re-indoctrination” camp, I’m not buying a real one either. No $200 tree in a box for me, but also no pre-cut, dried out, sap-oozing, needle-dropping, $99 refugee from a Michigan tree farm for me, either.

My parents divorced early in my life and have been remarried several times between them, which means my extremely complex family relations resemble more of a merger than a standard familial bond. It’s more like the close, personal relationships one develops with fellow passengers during a bus plunge. So the strange mélange of holiday traditions that have been passed, re-passed, co-mingled and co-opted by the various offspring that make up my siblings, half-siblings and step-siblings have allowed all of us to cherrypick the ones we like best and force them upon our own families. And the one that I consider sacrosanct is the annual chopping down of a free-range Christmas tree – the word “free” being the operative term.

My father has never in his 87 years of life paid for a Christmas tree, and he taught me all of the tricks of the trade. Overwhelmingly, his preferred manner of tree shopping involved long afternoon drives in the country searching for just the right combination of isolated location and questionable property ownership, returning as dusk fell to quickly chop down his prize. Over the years, we had a wild variety of trees – the standard pines, firs and spruces, and the not-so-standard hemlocks, cedars, cypresses, and arborvitaes. Some were downright dangerous to the touch, with the same sort of prickly nature as a cactus plant, which made the hanging of lights and ornaments a hazardous occupation. And true, there was the occasional bird or rodent that rode into the living room, buried deep within the tree’s hidden recesses. Some of my fondest memories were of Dad, heady with the scent of the hunt and emboldened by a couple of tankards of spiked nog, chasing a startled starling around the house, frantically batting at it with a broken pool cue stick. The holiday tradition was what really mattered, and it added a sense of wild adventure to our celebrations that other less adventuresome, retail-enslaved families missed. 

“And the price was right,” Dad would always say, cheerfully.

Obviously, as he got older and we moved to more densely populated urban areas, this became a more challenging activity. After all, the local bank branch or office park looked with prejudicial disfavor at the destruction of their expensive landscaping for the sake of one gritty, Depression-era gentleman’s ideas about Christmas celebration. And honestly, I thought it was a little over the top to call me wanting bail money that first year in the city. Especially during the busy holiday shopping season.

Technology has come to the aid of the modern Christmas tree shopper in the form of the Whack & Heckler 18-volt rechargeable, cordless chainsaw – a tiny titan of the tool world that makes quick work of surreptitious Nöel deforestation, especially in the gathering gloaming of December’s early sunsets. This year, I was especially happy with my choice – a six foot evergreen of some sort or other, discovered down a ravine far from civilization – because it sported what appeared in the bitter cold dusk to be tiny, baby-sized pine cones. I quickly channeled my inner Paul Bunyan, felled it, dragged it up the hill like a vanquished prize of war, lashed it to the roof of the car, and drove homeward.

Once I had mounted it in its stand in our living room, my sweetling was less than impressed. “It’s shaped funny,” she noted, “and it isn’t even green.” True, I had to admit that, once in the tungsten glow of our home, it did indeed look more brownish than greenish.

“Yes, but the price was right,” I quoted Dad. Somehow I didn’t think this impressed her.

“One of these days you’re gonna get arrested doing this. Or shot by somebody who catches you and your little George Washington hatchet trespassing on their property.”

“Oh come on,” I offered, “it’s Christmas. Look at the little baby-sized pine cones. I picked it out special. Have some nog.”

She soon warmed to the combination of the season and the pioneer spirit of adventure. Well, she at least warmed up enough that she soon helped me decorate the new tree. We strung the lights and hung our delicate ornaments. Against my own personal artistic judgment, I even let her heave great wads of shiny aluminum tinsel all over it – her own family’s favorite (if somewhat ghastly) decorating tradition. Frankly, I had to admit that the strands of shredded chrome helped to hide the brown looking branches. But we did take extra care to put lights close to the baby-sized pine cones to highlight their natural beauty.

Two nights later I was standing in the garage, on the other side of two closed doors, when I heard a shriek she usually reserves for finding Plymouth-sized spiders in the shower, or raccoons in the refrigerator again. I ran in to find her standing across the living room, pointing in horror at the Christmas tree.

“Your pine cones,” she hissed, with a combination of revulsion and rather pointed blame. “They’re moving!”

Sure enough, upon close examination, the pine cones were convulsing and bulging, with the unquestionable activity of something inside trying to escape. Into our living room. It seems that my baby-sized pine cones were, in fact, a rather active infestation of bagworms. Warmed by our central heating system and the close proximity of Christmas lights, the caterpillars inside of the cone-shaped brown sacks had thawed out and were now seeking to relocate. One had fallen to the floor, and the dachshund had already sailed triumphantly down the hallway with it held aloft like a trophy.

There was only one thing to do. I opened up the sliding glass door to the patio, picked up the tree, and heaved it out into the yard as far as I could in one hurl. A beaten man, I pulled on my coat, went out into the cold, retrieved the stand and the ornaments, and then dragged the fallen symbol of my pioneer spirit to the back of the yard where the caterpillars could refreeze in peace. 

I would later bone up on bagworms, and discover that I would have to pull all of the bags from the tree and burn them, since they were filled with eggs laid by the female worms, and would only go on to infest the evergreens in our yard next year. Since the tree was already chopped down anyway, up the whole thing would eventually go in a blaze to its Tannenbaum Valhalla.

Some traditions fade away, while others die a much quicker death. My holiday tradition took just long enough for a drive to the Hardware Hut to be smothered completely. I now sit puffing my pipe and sipping my nog, looking at a wire and plastic thing masquerading as a tree. It did just take five minutes to set up, with no fuss, and no risk of arrest for criminal trespassing. If I squint a bit and sit across the room with the room's lights turned down low, it looks just like the real thing. The evergreen-scented air freshener completes the illusion. And there will be no pine needles to clog up the vacuum, and certainly no bagworms to evict. I can pack it up the day after New Years, and no one will ever know. 

But it’s just not the same.

Memorial Day and the Mason Who Started It

The Indiana War Memorial in Indianapolis

Don't forget why you have today off.

Undoubtedly, what little is left of the local newspaper in your town today has a story of one or two area service members who survived a war, or didn't. They do it every year on Memorial Day and Veterans Day, half the time not knowing the difference between the two. And if you look a little deeper, you will find comments posted from family members who just want more than anything else for their loved one to simply be remembered, if only for one day of the year.

Please remember all of those thousands upon thousands of men and women whose names never got in the paper, except perhaps for a brief obituary, who have given so much for all of us.

Soldiers and Sailors Monument on Monument Circle

My hometown of Indianapolis is a unique place in America when it comes to remembering the human toll of armed conflict and the men and women who have, and continue, to serve all of the rest of us. Back in the early 1970s when the mere mention of Jane Fonda's name could incite full blown bar fights over her gallivanting across Vietnam and venting her naïve spleen over American soldiers, the actress and anti-war activist once sneered that Indianapolis was a city of little more than monuments to war. (Little wonder that the Indiana General Assembly in 1973 officially censured Fonda for her incendiary claims that former American POWs had lied about their torture while captives of the North Vietnamese). 

American Legion Mall

But the truth is that we are second only to Washington D.C. when it comes to the sheer number of our monuments and memorials to fallen warriors. Just in our downtown area, we have the Indiana War Memorial and Museum; the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in the middle of our Circle; the USS Indianapolis Memorial; the American Legion Mall with its Sunken Garden and Cenotaph, World War II, Korean and Vietnam Memorials; Veteran's Memorial Plaza; and the 9/11 Memorial.

Our downtown Military Park was originally the official Military Ground in which our militias would train and drill, and where the City held its first Independence day celebrations. It''s the oldest park in town. 

Crown Hill National Cemetery for Union Soldiers

Garfield Park on the South Side has a monument to Confederate soldiers who died in our Union POW Camp Morton here during the Civil War. Meanwhile, Crown Hill Cemetery has within it the Crown Hill National Cemetery in which fallen Union soldiers are interred. It's not far from the official Masonic burial section. And their veterans' Field of Honor with its Eternal Flame is in the northern section of the property, if you go under the 38th Street tunnel. 

Indianapolis Motor Speedway

Even our internationally renowned annual Indianapolis 500 Indycar race is held on the Sunday before Memorial Day, and heavily tied to its commemoration.

Congressional Medal of Honor Memorial

If by chance you do ever come to Indianapolis, give yourself an hour or so to visit the Congressional Medal of Honor Memorial along the banks of the canal downtown. There you will find all of the names and a few stories of the 3,506 recipients (with 3525 awarded, some multiples) since the Medal's creation in 1861.

But as amazing and heroic and tragic and heartbreaking as those histories are, soldiers, sailors, and airmen don't always receive big impressive medals before or after they don't make it home. Most of them don't, and their stories don't always get memorialized. For every one we hear about are hundreds we never do. They have families and histories that need to be remembered too, beyond just a name on a forgotten stone in a grassy field somewhere nobody visits very often. Even on a special holiday just for them.

A famous Freemason thought that very same thing.

Major General John A. Logan

Logan Lodge No. 575 here in Indianapolis was chartered in 1888, and is named after Major General John A. Logan, one of the most famous and popular Union Army generals of the Civil War. Because he was born and raised by settlers who (like Abraham Lincoln himself) had come to Illinois out of Kentucky, Logan's sympathies were torn by both sides in the conflict. His own brother-in-law, Hilbert A. Cunningham, joined the Confederate Army for two years as head of the South's only Northern-born group, Company G of the 15th Tennessee, before deserting in 1863 to join the Union side, where he became a captain on John Logan's staff.

After the war, John Logan became a fierce Republican, an Illinois congressman and senator, a vice-presidential candidate, and was one of seven managers of the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson. He was a staunch supporter for the cause of Veterans, and was one of the primary advocates of creating what eventually came to be called Memorial Day as a national holiday – a day that is important all across America, but especially here in Indianapolis.

Brother Logan was raised as a Master Mason in Mitchell Lodge No. 85 in Pinckneyville, Illinois. He was a York Rite Mason and Templar in Chicago. He was also a member of the Scottish Rite there, and was elected to be coroneted a 33° in 1886, but died before it could be conferred.

Memorial Day (originally known as Decoration Day) was officially declared on May 5th, 1868 by General Logan, in his role as national commander of a relatively new fraternal group, the Grand Army of the Republic. It was first observed on May 30th of that year when flowers were placed on the graves of both Union and Confederate soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery. As a result of his own personal circumstances and his experience during the war, as well as his wide popularity throughout the reunited nation, he was uniquely qualified to establish this healing annual day for observance and memory.

HEADQUARTERS GRAND ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC

General Orders No.11, WASHINGTON, D.C., May 5, 1868

The 30th day of May, 1868, is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet church-yard in the land. In this observance no form of ceremony is prescribed, but posts and comrades will in their own way arrange such fitting services and testimonials of respect as circumstances may permit.

We are organized, comrades, as our regulations tell us, for the purpose among other things, "of preserving and strengthening those kind and fraternal feelings which have bound together the soldiers, sailors, and marines who united to suppress the late rebellion." What can aid more to assure this result than cherishing tenderly the memory of our heroic dead, who made their breasts a barricade between our country and its foes? Their soldier lives were the reveille of freedom to a race in chains, and their deaths the tattoo of rebellious tyranny in arms. We should guard their graves with sacred vigilance. All that the consecrated wealth and taste of the nation can add to their adornment and security is but a fitting tribute to the memory of her slain defenders. Let no wanton foot tread rudely on such hallowed grounds. Let pleasant paths invite the coming and going of reverent visitors and fond mourners. Let no vandalism of avarice or neglect, no ravages of time testify to the present or to the coming generations that we have forgotten as a people the cost of a free and undivided republic.

If other eyes grow dull, other hands slack, and other hearts cold in the solemn trust, ours shall keep it well as long as the light and warmth of life remain to us.

Let us, then, at the time appointed gather around their sacred remains and garland the passionless mounds above them with the choicest flowers of spring-time; let us raise above them the dear old flag they saved from hishonor; let us in this solemn presence renew our pledges to aid and assist those whom they have left among us a sacred charge upon a nation's gratitude, the soldier's and sailor's widow and orphan.

It is the purpose of the Commander-in-Chief to inaugurate this observance with the hope that it will be kept up from year to year, while a survivor of the war remains to honor the memory of his departed comrades. He earnestly desires the public press to lend its friendly aid in bringing to the notice of comrades in all parts of the country in time for simultaneous compliance therewith.
Department commanders will use efforts to make this order effective.
By order of

JOHN A. LOGAN,
Commander-in-Chief

N.P. CHIPMAN,
Adjutant General

Official:
WM. T. COLLINS, A.A.G.

The Grand Army of the Republic was made up of veterans of the Union Army who had served in the Civil War. By 1890, the GAR had 490,000 members, and held an annual National Encampment every year from 1866 until its final encampment right here in Indianapolis in 1949. Seven years later, its last member, Albert Woolson, died, and the GAR formally folded its last flag and vanished. But Memorial Day outlived its creators, and continues to be celebrated to this day.

Don't simply treat the day as part of a warm three day weekend. Take a moment to reflect upon those men and women who have given the "last full measure of devotion" for their country. Start by asking the Brethren in your lodge about themselves, their families, or your own former and fallen members from earlier times. Perhaps even the namesake of your lodge, like John Logan. Decorate their graves. Visit their memorials. Tell their stories. Raise the flag in their honor. Lift up their widows and orphans. 

And remember.

Big Day

June 19th this year is a big day.

First, it is, of course, Father's Day. That's my dad, Charles J. Hodapp, Jr., in 1944 in Victorville, California in his AT-11. He just turned 93 this year.

Happy Father's Day to all the dads, from their sons who love them.

It is also "Juneteenth," an observance of the end of slavery in the United States. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had become official on January 1, 1863. But it was on June 19th, 1865 that Major General Gordon Granger with a detachment of Union soldiers landed at Galveston, Texas announcing that the Civil War was over. Granger's first act was to read General Order Number 3:

"The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and free laborer."

And if you are neither a Dad, nor an African-American, internationally it is also World Sauntering Day, created in the 70's at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island, Michigan. It's goal is "to remind us to take it easy, smell the roses, and enjoy life as opposed to rushing through it."

I'm lighting up the first pipe I've smoked since my recent health snag, and going out for a casual stroll.