This heritage hardwood floor is face nailed.

This face nailed hardwood floor is in a home outside London, Ontario. The hardwood flooring looked good, considering its age, but on closer examination it was obvious this floor had been face nailed.

No one face nails an entire hardwood floor today. I was left to wonder just how common this practice was in the past. The home in which this floor is to found is more than a century old. The owner assured me that more homes in the area had similar floors.

Clearly there is a heavy price to be paid in esthetics. But that said, and accepted, the floor is amazingly squeak free. I imagine if one heard a squeak, pull the nail or nail in the area, and replace all with longer ones. Squeak gone.

Was this a southwestern Ontario aberration or was this done in many localities a hundred years ago?

Not exactly the white Christmas of story and song

It was a white Christmas in London, Ontario. But it was not the white thanks to snow but on account of heavy fog. It was a white and green and all-too-warm Christmas. The grandkids are looking forward to skiing come January and I'm getting concerned.

Christmas was a once a time to receive a London-made toy

Christmas morning once meant getting a few toys, games or puzzles from Somerville Industries and made right here in London, Ontario. Not so today. My granddaughters toys all game from mostly from China with one coming from Korea and another from Germany. Canadian made toys are a rarity.

I cannot understand why the simple, injection-molded plastic pan flutes given two of my granddaughters could not be made in London as stuff like this was in the past. But they aren't.

Oh well, enough of this. It's time to change tack and wish all a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year. Some believe saying merry Christmas is politically incorrect today. Try telling that to my Muslim neighbours. The ones with the Christmas tree. They say the season is fun. They enjoy it. The mother and daughter especially enjoy the tradition of baking sweets for the holiday. And I assure you that their baklava is a sweet. There can be no argument.

In London, malls are not the shopping destinations they once were.

Every year my wife and I take two of our granddaughters Christmas shopping. We tour the stores in White Oaks mall and when done the kids and I stop for mini Cinnabon. It is an evil delight. Grandma doesn't partake and that just underlines how bad having an icing-topped Cinnabon must be.

White Oaks was possibly the first mall in London. Built by a local family on a major thoroughfare leading from the core to the four-lane highway serving the city, the mall was a great success.Over the intervening years it has faced a lot of competition and, although it has been hit hard, it is still arguably the most popular mall in town.

That said, the stores were not packed. The wide corridors were not bustling. The line-up for a Cinnabon wasn't long. With the biggest anchor stores now gone, the mall, appears to be marking time, holding its own.

I see the images of malls found in other cities and posted by members of this group and I'm jealous. Our remaining malls are nowhere near as grand. In fact, grand seems to be the kiss-of-death for a London mall.

Our downtown once boasted a true high-end mall. It cost something in the neighbourhood of $135 million to build back in the 1990s. Today that mall has lost almost everything it once sported at its opening, including its original name.

The shortest day of the year

The Canadian singer Bruce Cockburn has a song "The Coldest Day of the Year". Well, yesterday wasn't the coldest day of the year, not even close. But, it was the shortest day of the year with the sun appearing to set just before five o'clock.

London is set smack dab in the middle of some of the richest, most productive farmland in Canada. The farm fields extend right into the growing city. It is not uncommon for the land to be filled with a fast-growing crop of corn one year and a rapidly-expanding suburban neighbourhood the next.

When you can't afford a trip to Europe

A fellow by the name of Ian Newton posted this to a Facebook page called If You Grew Up In London, Ontario, You Will Remember When...

I'm sure there may be more that could be said about our area's use of borrowed place-names. Kitchener, to the right of the route marked in blue, was originally called Berlin. The name was changed in 1916, driven by anti-German sentiment common in the region during the First World War.

Not far from London on the Lake Erie shore is Port Glasgow. It likes to brag that perch, pickerel, salmon and rainbow trout are all to found not far from the port. And I would not be surprised to learn a few kilt-wearing men could also be found in the area if one were to look. You see, Port Glasgow was settled more than two centuries ago by Scottish immigrants moving to the area.

Smart phones not made here

Everywhere I go I see folk using their smart phones to take pictures and to text and even, sometimes, to talk. These new tools seem to be ubiquitous.

As a Londoner, I see something else. I see a technology that slipped from our grasp. At one time, London was home to a massive Nortel plant. It made telephones, and not just for Canada but for the world. When I was in Tunisia back in the 1990s, I saw a Northern Telecom building outside Tunis on the way to Sidi Bou Said.

Nortel was such a powerhouse of a telecommunications giant that at one point more than a quarter of the value of the Toronto Stock Exchange was claimed by Nortel.

But that was then. Today the plant is gone. The company almost forgotten. Telephones and most state-of-the-art telecommunications equipment are now made offshore. About the strongest lasting memory of the once giant company are the ones held by the workers who found themselves without jobs and without the pensions they had been promised. 

Giants can be very disappointing.