It's disturbing when you find yourself agreeing with one of those statements somebody's printed on money.

One of those things that makes you want to reconsider some of your own views. . .

More economic news. Local retail and energy.

We recently wrote a long entry here on the Wyoming economy:

Lex Anteinternet: The Wyoming Economy. Looking at it in a different...:    Big Horn foothills. There's a reason why I've posted this here, but you'll have to slog through the post to discover why. ...

Related to that a bit are a couple of article in Wyoming's news that appear today in the local economy, and some from the past week.

One is that the great local bookstore (which has my book in stock) noted a downturn this year.  Now, before there's concern, they're not going out of business, they're just noting a downturn, but that's clearly related to the economy.  They started noticing it during the Christmas Season.

This tops into something I should have written about in my earlier post on the economy, but didn't.  One way to really help the economy is to support local businesses, of which this is a great example.  When I was a kid, there were two bookstores in town. The mall came in, and eventually it had two chain bookstores, and the downtown bookstore closed.  However, the one independent kept on keeping on and eventually a new downtown bookstore was opened, and a used bookstore was also opened downtown. The two mall chain bookstores closed.  For awhile, we had three downtown bookstores, but the owners of one sold it and it has since closed.  The one in the paper, however, remains a great strong bookstore.

Wyomingites are great about "buy local", but we often don't, and in this age of the Internet it's easy not to.  I'm as guilty as anyone else, and in a Wyoming city there are indeed things you won't find locally, or offered by a local retailer.  But you will find more than you suppose.  We have in Casper several Wyoming owned outdoor sporting goods stores besides one chain, and the local ones hole their own against the chain.  Nearby Glenrock has a small specialized third.  We retain, amazingly, an independent record store, which is really against the odds.

 

 Independent record store day being celebrated by the local independent record store this year.

And we have a host of local barbers, competing with the chain outfits.  A variety of good automobile repair shops keep on keeping on.  There are, in short, a lot of businesses holding their own against the big box stores.  We even retain an independent appliance store.

People ought to keep them in mind.  If we had an economic  system that was geared towards business ownership, as we often like to pretend we do, we'd favor distributism at least at the retail level, and maybe even at the distribution level. We don't.  But some manage to keep on anyhow.  These business supply livelihoods to their owners and direct contact with "upper management" in a way that big chains don't.  That should count into our calculation in doing business.

Also in the news today is the news that Wyoming's rig count is at a twenty three year low.

That's right, we are down to the lowest number of rigs since 1993.

In 1993 I was only three years out of law school, having taken that turn in careers as there was no work in geology, my undergraduate major.  Those of us who went through those times expected them to come back, and they did.  Predictions about things turning around keep coming in, but I wouldn't expect that to occur too soon.

And we also received the news this past week that Cloud Peak, another major player in the energy industry here is laying employees off.

Sinclair Oil Corporation founded on this day in 1916

 

 Sinclair advertisement in Hudson Wyoming.

Sinclair Oil Corporation, which recently announced a major turnaround at its refinery in Casper Wyoming, was founded on this day in 1916.

The founder of the company, Harry F. Sinclair, created the company by merging the assets of eleven small petroleum companies. 

The company has long had a presence in Wyoming with even a town being named after it.

 

Former Parco Hotel in Sinclair, which was once called Parco.

The Wyoming Economy. Looking at it in a different way.

 

 Big Horn foothills. There's a reason why I've posted this here, but you'll have to slog through the post to discover why.

I thought about starting this thread just the other day.  On what must surely be a "Great Wyoming Minds Think Alike" type of day, Neil Waring, on one of his blogs (like me, he keeps more than one blog) posted this item on the same topic:

Wyoming Fact and Fiction: Bring on the Tourists: Must Be In Wyoming With Wyoming coal now suffering at the hands of environmentalists, the downturn in crude oil prices, and natural g...

So he got there first.

I'm going to post anyway, however, and in doing that I'm actually combining three draft post that I had sitting in the hopper, one that dates as far back as last summer (there are ones older than that, I don't always write stuff in one sitting or block by any means).

I've been posting a lot on Wyoming's economy here recently. And almost everything I've posted on that has been bad economics news.  Petroleum oil is been sick in the respiratory ward for months.  Natural Gas is convalescing with a low price head cold that threatens to turn into pneumonia.  Coal is in the ICU and might not make it back out.  And just yesterday we learned that Uranium, a fuel that has nothing to do with anything we've just mentioned whatsoever, is in trouble here, due to an earthquake several years ago in far off Japan.

Now, in some other states people would just shrug and not worry much about this.  But Wyoming's economy is heavily invested in the extractive industries.  Indeed, as things started to tank I heard nervous comments about how this wasn't so anymore, but it is.

The extractive industries

Almost all of our real industry and almost all of our government revenue derives from the extractive industries.  Everyone depends on them.  The way it works is this way.  The resources is taken out of the ground and taxed.  That's where the state gets most of its revenue.  If the lease if public, the Federal government or the State gets more revenue, depending upon who holds the lease, and if that lease is Federal the Federal government pays back to the state an additional amount.  Obviously, the people working in the extractive industry make their money there. But so do all the vast number of support industries.  And that ripples out from there. As oil companies lay people off, for example, the support industries start too. And soon, not all that long thereafter, the hotels are empty, etc.

 

Early Wyoming oilfield.

Indeed, the Alaskan fishing industry was down in town the other day recruiting laborers used to hard physical labor to work on fish processing boats.  Seems odd, but makes sense.  When we couldn't find laborers in this state we recruited in depressed Michigan for the same reason.

Anyhow, with coal, oil, natural gas, and uranium all in a slump. the state's really hurting.  And it should be noted that this always tends to happen in this freakish way. There's no reason that the price of petroleum oil should fall along with coal, let alone uranium, but that's happened to us before.  An entire town in northern Carbon County disappeared just as the coal mining towns were starting to nearly disappear, and this in the 1980s.  Here we go again.

Well, whenever a slump happens we tend to wring our hands and declare, like The Who, that "We Won't Get Fooled Again" by the cyclical nature of the extractive industries.  Here we must note that some are so invested in the concept that the extractive industries are Wyoming that to even say that is taken as some sort of slam against them, which isn't true at all. Rather, we have to acknowledge the nature of those industries, which is that they boom and bust.  When they are booming, the income and revenue stream they provide to the state is great.  When they crash, however, it's a problem if we haven't prepared for it, and we seem not to.

As part of that, and here we need to be thinking of coal and its future, some of our former extractive industries do indeed disappear over time.  Wyoming at one time mined iron and gold.  It doesn't anymore.  Indeed, I posted some photos of a former gold mine at South Pass on a thread at Holscher's Hub, that thread being this one:

The Carissa Mine, South Pass Wyoming
 

Even within the last fifteen or so years there's been speculation about the possibilities of opening the mining at South Pass back up.  Well, I suppose its a remote possibility, but the key word  there is remote.  Sometimes the bust is for keeps.

Indeed, one of  my grandmothers on my father's side was from Leadville Colorado.  She was born there.  Her father had come there as a gold miner originally.  He switched to being a merchant, and they later moved to Denver, but Leadville provides a good example.  Leadville's mines closed and the town limped along for decades before remaking itself into something else, finally accepting that gold and heavy metal mining was not going to come back.

Now, I'm not saying that petroleum oil and natural gas will not come back. They may not come roaring back, but they'll come back.  But we should be cautious about assuming that they'll come back in the same way that Rick from Casablanca assured Elsa about regret, that it would come "maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and always."  The reason we should be cautious here is that there is reason to believe, at least with petroleum oil, that we may in fact be living in a new production regime.  For years people worried about "peak oil", with people who enjoy being alarmed particularly enjoying worrying about it. But it turns out that the problem here may not be peak oil, but we don't need the oil as much anymore, and that this trend will grow.  It seems to be.  In fact Saudi Arabia is literally banking on it, ramping up production to dominate the market while it scoops up what it thinks is the last of the oil bucks.  This doesn't mean oil will go away entirely, but it might mean that in an environment in which it is used increasingly less as a fuel it won't have the value it once had.

It seems unlikely that we fact the same story with natural gas, which is likely to be used more in the future.  The problem here is, right now, that there's a lot of it, so the price is depressed.  We shouldn't assume that this will be the situation for eternity, however, and therefore we ought to really pause when we see gas being flared, as someday we may wish that we had it to sell.  Right now, however, the price is in the basement.  This past week the industry pinned some hopes on being able to export gas to China, which a recent Federal statute encourages.  We'll see how that goes.

With both petroleum oil and natural gas we'll also have to watch the advance of technology, which has been a huge factor in the recent boom. Hardly noticed it was also a factor in the slow revival of uranium with technology advancing so much in regards the mineral that scares the dickens out of the very people who should embrace it ardently that we don't really mine it in the conventional sense anymore. We drill for it and "mine" it in solution.  So here, the mineral that once created enormous mines with high paying jobs does not even with the price is good.  It still provides jobs, bu they're drilling jobs and infrastructure jobs.  Indeed infrastructure in some ways turns out to be the long term stable set of jobs for petroleum, gas and uranium.

I'll omit addressing the sad state of coal as I've written about it so much recently.

Anyhow, all that is really background for the observation that Wyoming has had a strong attachment to the petroleum industry since day one, but we've had a hard time ever accepting the boom and bust nature of it.  This isn't a criticism of the industry so much as its an observation on the reality of our blindness to problems in this area.  So this has always been a part of our economic picture, and that's what I propose to examine here, our long term economic picture.

The state's economic constants

As far back as you can go in Wyoming's history there are certain economic constants.  Some of them are that we have a collection of industries all related to one thing that just keep on keeping on.  Another is that we have hoped for the extractive industries to work economic miracles from our very onset of existence.  A third is the background role of government in providing jobs, even when we've been hostile to that.  Let's look at that.

And let's look again at oil.

Oil, and the other extractive industries, but oil very much in particular has been the expectant economic hope of Wyoming almost from day one.

July 15, 1891, Natrona County Tribune, reporting on both oil and gas production.

This may be surprising, really, for those who think of the early history of Wyoming all in the context of cattlemen, or perhaps earlier in the context of Mountain Men and Indians.  And it is certainly the case that cattlemen and Indians are part of the story (and still are, and we'll be looking at that shortly), but oil was expected to bring big returns early on.  Indeed the first time I realized that was in trying to research the Johnson County War back when I was in high school, as I plowed through a pile of microfiche issues of the Natrona County Tribune.  Issue after issue discussed oil finds, not, I expect, what we expect to see from a Natrona County newspaper in the 1890s. But it's there.

Okay, well so what?

Well, the point is that oil, gas, and coal are there and always have been.  But the boom and bust nature of those industries has always been part of them.  When the price rises, as it always has, we leap into them great guns.  After awhile we expect the boom to be eternal, even though there's always good indicators that the boom will not be.  And we are always surprised by the crash.

Wyoming Oil World, June 15, 1918.  A crash was soon to occur with the end of World War One.

A real change, it should be noted, has occurred in the oil industry since the 1980s, and that's been the demise of the local refinery.  This has to be noted here as its significant, and ties into what I'll later note.  Wyoming had refineries almost from the onset of oil exploration here.  Casper had three refineries here in town up until the 1980s. Every town in Wyoming had one, it seemed.  Glenrock had a refinery.  Laramie had a refinery.  Now we have four operating refineries of which I'm aware.  Maybe there are more, but I'm not aware of them.  Refineries provided good blue collar jobs for decades, now they provide very few.  In fairness, gas plants have come in whereas up until fairly recently we didn't have many of them.  But that points out what I intended to note above.  Gas builds and is still building infrastructure in Wyoming.  Petroleum oil does as well, but not in the way it once did. Refining has tended to shift to super huge refineries on the Gulf Coast, which can take in U.S. production, and also take in imported production.

 

Standard Oil Refinery in Casper.

So what we can accept here is that oil and gas will remain, but in looking at this aspect of our economy, can't we do more to build local stable jobs from that?  We'll round back around to that towards the end.

So, we've looked at coal, gas, uranium and oil a bit, and will come back to them, what else is out there?  We tend not to notice much until the crash.  One thing is what Neil Waring already noted, tourism, but we will come back to that bit later also.  That's because, in order to look at tourism, we have to look at why anyone comes here at all.  And that comes from. . . agriculture.

Agriculture

 Oats

Agriculture is the great ignored industry in Wyoming.

This will being the hackles up on some, because agriculture in Wyoming is generally conceived of as ranching, and ranching has some real opponents in the modern U.S., even though in the West, contrary to the anti's views, its darned near environmentally neutral.  In fact, truth be known, it's environmentally positive if objectively views. That's right, that's what I'm saying as that's the truth. An environmentalist, if they're realistic, ought to thank a rancher every time he sees one (and ought to be for nuclear power also, but that's another topic).

 

Laramie Range hayfield.

Agriculture is an economic constant in Wyoming. While there was some economic activity, even national economic activity, if we consider that courier du bois  and trappers were in fact part of an international industry, it's agriculture that really created the state and made it what it was, and is.

Agriculture made its appearance in a recognizable form in Wyoming as early as the 1840s when New Mexican laborers brought up to work on Adobe buildings at Ft. Laramie stayed on and started small vegetable farms on the "Mexican Hills" near there.  This gave them in an income in that the produce was available to sell both to soldiers at Ft. Laramie as well as to travelers on the Oregon Trail, who by that time no doubt were pretty darned ready for something green and fresh.  Unfortunately, while the area remains a farming area, as far as I know there aren't any farms in the area that are descendant from the original ones.

Cattle, of course, is what we think of in terms of Wyoming agriculture, although it was really farming that made its the first appearance and it certainly continues on in a big way.  Crop farming continues on in southeastern Wyoming which has a climate and soil much like Nebraska's, and hence is part of the giant corn and wheat belt that stretches all the way into the Mid West and which is a massive part of the economy in many such states.  It also exists in Fremont County as well, and in Big Horn and Washakie Counties.  Hay crop production exists in many places, as long as there's water to support it.

 

Porta-vet box of a large animal vetrinarian.  A common ranch site in some times of the year.

Where there isn't sufficient water, which is most of the state we have cattle and sheep, although now days mostly cattle.  And Wyoming cattle live out on the range.  They're fed in the winter, but on the range.  Really, they're making use of the ground that in earlier eras buffalo made use of and in the same way, save for the fact that buffalo tended to crowd into Cottonwood groves in the winter and destroy them.

It's cattle and sheep that keep Wyoming wild.  This use of the land keeps the land open and natural. When that stops, you get houses and "ranchettes", something that environmentalist should keep in mind.  A strong cattle industry makes for a strong wild Wyoming.

Given this, and that it's so much a part of the background of the state, you'd think that this is an industry the state would seek to support in some ways.  But it doesn't.  Stockmen and other agriculturalist are largely on their own in all sorts of ways.  There is the leased ground, a very misunderstood public asset, but even this is under attack, unfortunately by agriculturalist as well as others.  At any rate, agriculture is an industry which, in spite of the slams against it, just keeps on keeping on by itself under its own steam, ignored by the state and by Wyoming communities.

It should and must be noted that employment in this industry has really changed over the years.  In the early days Wyoming ranches large and small employed a fair number of people directly.  That was due tot he nature of the operations, and even though a very significant amount of the labor on ranches remains the same now as it was in 1890, not nearly as many people are directly employed in the industry as once were.  There are a lot of reasons for this.

 

One reason is that barbed wire changed the nature of ranching and accelerated the change to smaller, in relative terms, family operations.  When that occurred large numbers of year around employees were not needed and to some extent those employees were members of the immediate family.  As this evolution took place family run operations relied on neighbors and friends for additional labor support during those times of the years which, at one time, caused large numbers of seasonal cowhands to be employed.

Another big factor was the 4x4 truck.  Up until World War Two ranches had to rely on cowhands stationed at the edges of their lands for winter feeding in many instances. The truck stopped that, and it reduced the need for labor as well.  Ranchers that once would employ several hands on remote areas of their ranches could now simply drive their with a 4x4 truck.  Such trucks were first available immediately after the war, and it was the war that really brougth them on in strength and proved their utility.  So now many ranches, even large ones, employ no individual cowhands at all, although there are still quite a few that do.

 

World War Two era Dodge 4x4 truck.  With very little in the way of change, this model would go into civilian production immediately after World War Two.

The demise of the sheep industry also really played a large role in the number of direct employees.  There are still Sheepmen in Wyoming, but not like they once were. And this is because, in part, due to the fact that that sheep production was in fact one of the rare areas where there was government involvement, as up until the late 1980s the Federal Government supported the price of wool due to the Defense Wool program.  That program came in during the Korean War when the military had to purchase heavy woolen clothing in large quantities and found that there wasn't a sufficient supply of it. The wool program was therefore brought in but it carried on well after it probably should not have.  Even defending the program it has to be admitted that ending it in the late 1980s made sense, keeping in mind that we hadn't fought a cold weather war since 1954 (we would again in the 2000s) and the technology of winter clothing had changed a lot in that 30 year period.

 Sheep in Natrona County, Wyoming, 1940s.  This photo could have been taken at any point in the 20th Century up into the 1990s.

Also related to it, however, is that the United Kingdom joined the European Community which in turn caused the UK to dump the market policies that favored its former Dominions.  During the late Empire stage of the UK the UK had a policy of developing agricultural production in its Dominions but finishing the products in the UK. So Australian, New Zealand and Canadian wool all went to fine British wool mills for a finished product.  When the UK became part of the EC, however, that violated the EC's policies and the British stopped doing that, focusing on local markets instead.  Indeed, the EC has sort of a bizarre semi autarkic economic policy that heavily impacts agriculture in a negative way in some instances and which explains some odd things, such as a constant EU effort at serious beef production, which it really doesn't have an agricultural landmass to support properly.

When that occurred the Australians dumped their wool in the United States and an already ailing American wool industry was really hurt. So we see few sheep now, although they've come back a bit.

The sheep industry supported an infrastructure that was immediate and obvious, which brings us to the next part of this story.  While Wyoming has lost direct employment in agriculture, it's really lost the infrastructure over the years in a major way.

Early on, there was no infrastructure and everything produced here was shipped out for processing in some fashion.  We've almost completely returned to that.  Turning first to wool, when the sheep industry massively contracted all the supporting wool buyers and shearers, an immediate support industry, were hurt.  But its in other areas where the change has been more dramatic in some ways.  Wyoming once had a very large number of stockyards. Every city had them, and they were mostly associated with railroads.  Those are almost all gone, and that's due to the fact that commercial trucking has completely taken over that role from the railroads, although as late as the 1990s the railroads were still attempting to get back into this for sheep.  Perhaps nothing can be done about that and it was inevitable.

Less inevitable, however has been the end of the local meat processing operations on a large scale. There are still some, but they're really small custom houses.  It was this industry that brought my father's family to Wyoming, as we owned a packing plant here in Casper. Today there is no packing plant in Casper, or anywhere in Wyoming for that matter, of that type.  The plant produced not only meat for sale to stores, but other products as well.  Now, you will not find that in Wyoming.  The cattle are all here, but they are shipped out of state for finishing and processing.

 Closed packing plant, Omaha Nebraska.

You'll also not find much in the way of dairy production, although the Starr Valley in western Wyoming hands on in this area, producing cheese on a commercial basis. At one time most larger towns had a creamery that processed milk, and indeed my family had one for a time here in Casper. That meant that there were dairy cows nearby, which there were, and where you have dairy cows, you have to have a large quantity of high quality hay for them, which was also produced locally.

 

Former Jersey Creamery, Casper Wyoming.

Now all of this is gone.  National consolidation of these things is the reason why.  The situation in the meat packing industry is legendary and is the source of steady complaints from both ranchers and consumers.  Indeed, ti's slowly spawned a direct buy movement, which is now pretty common, where families will purchase a cow, i.e., a "beef", for a half beef, for slaughter.

Having said all of this, the direct economic impact of agriculture remains quite large in Wyoming, it's just not very well noted by anyone. Independent truckers, local feeds stores, professional services, and even local manufacturing all rely on it pretty heavily.  Seemingly nobody notices.  Indeed, in some instances, local governments can be a bit hostile to agriculture when some sorts of support facilities are proposed.

Before I depart from this topic, I'm going to note one thing that seems self evident but for some reason is never treated that way.  Silvaculture, the raising of trees for harvest, is agriculture. That makes logging part of agriculture.  Indeed in Wyoming, all logging, to the extent any remains, and it isn't much, takes place on land that cattle are normally on.  Logging is an industry that's really been hurt in the US over the last thirty years and this may actually be one area where environmental concerns have hurt agriculture, although ironically here too its something that environmentalist should reconsider.  Growing trees are carbon sinks.  Full grown trees much less so.

 

 Cattle sharing ground with camping fisherman.

Tourism of all types

In a real sense the tourism industry, and if we consider out of state sportsmen part of that, which we should, is ancillary to agriculture.  It's the open lands, largely caused by agriculture, that cause people to come in and tour Wyoming for a whole host of reasons.  Neil Waring, as noted, has done a fine entry on that the other day and I'll not go into it, therefore, in too much depth.  I will note that most towns and cities have gotten pretty good at promoting this.  Indeed, maybe a little too good.

I will turn however to the sportsmen aspect of this, which is often missed and which may be the part of this that aggravates locals the most.  Indeed, some months ago, before the downturn in the economy here really got rolling in a big way, I ran across this:

Found on Facebook and posted via fair use.

This was going to be on one of those threads I started as a draft quite awhile back, and I'm just getting around to posting now, as I think the topic has changed a bit in context.

When I was a boy, you used to frequently see a bumper sticker around here that said "Live in Colorado, fish in Colorado. . . live in Wyoming, fish in Wyoming. The gist was that people were tired of being overrun with Colorado fishermen.

It was also during a period of time when we were in one of those oil booms.  We felt rather overrun, including by Colorado fishermen.  The view wasn't limited to fishermen, however, as it extended to out of state hunters in general.  This was particularly the case when landowners, who can be their own worst enemies, took a legislative run at trying to own the state's wildlife, a move that came about with a view much like that of the effort to get the Federal Government to give us a gift of the Federal domain against our own interest.

I ran across this on Facebook (actually I ran across it sometime back, and started working on it as a draft, and then forgot about it and rediscovered it). When I did, the old complaint was back, but when I first noted this, we were in what turned out to be the last stages of an oil boom, now turned to bust, and that's what happened the last time too.  When I started this, it was really reminding me of the 1970s.   Our current times, however, remind me of the 1980s.  I wonder if these sentiments, that caused the revival of this view, will now persevere.  One thing that we really started thinking shortly after this is how glad we were that out of state outdoorsmen came in and spent their cash when they did.

That's where I suspect we are again.

And then there's the government.

The Government and Employment in Wyoming

Oh, I know, what people expect on this, particularly from a Wyomingite, is "that darned government is ruining everything. . . we need to get the government out of . . . "

And, indeed, if you read the newspaper comments on Governor Mead's recent decision to scale back the state government by 8% in spending, you'll see some comments of that type.

But, as I posted here awhile back, government spending has been propping up the state's economy recently and keeping the downturn from being a wholesale disaster. . . so far.

We hate to think of this that way, but a good argument can be made that, in the economy we've had since the 1890s, the government is one leg of a three legged stool.  One of those legs, the mineral industry, is now wobbly, another, agriculture and what it supports, keeps on keeping on, and the third, government, is saving our bacon right now.

It's doing that through, in part, construction projects, but that's not all.  In quite a few towns around Wyoming government itself is the major employer.  In Natrona County the school district is the largest single employer.  Indeed, even the bus fleet the school district supports is really impressive.  If we add the towns, cities and the county itself, and then the Federal Government, you get quite the number of employees.   A state agency, the Oil & Gas Commission, has a major building here.

And lets' not forget the Federal Government, one of our favorite whipping boys around here.  The Bureau of Land Management, which gets no love it seems, has quite a facility here supporting both agriculture as well as the mineral industry.  The Soil Conservation Service also has a facility. The constant suggestions that we "take back" the Federal Domain in part amount to a suggestion that we just axe these agencies and have no real state expression of them which would mean. . . more jobs right out the window.  We already know that we don't have the money to spend in this are that the Federal Government does, so really, we just aren't going to. And in turn we would stumble and stammer under the strain. "Trail permit?   Um. . . . what's a trail permit. . . what's a trail?"

And stuff like this is true all around Wyoming.  Douglas has the Police Academy. Every county has a Game and Fish facility.  Laramie has the university.  Every substantial town has a community college or an extension of the University of Wyoming.  Guernsey has a major state park and the huge National Guard training range (really an Army training range).  Northwest Wyoming has the parks, and not just Yellowstone.  It goes on and on.

And part of the way that it goes on and on has to do with the massive amount of government sponsored construction that goes on here.  Schools (three huge projects in Natrona County alone), highways, it's nearly endless.

So where do we go?

So then, what to make of this?

Well, usually when we go through a crash, we start to talk about diversification.  We also usually start to take about cutting back government spending.  And we're going to have to talk about a new government revenue sources, or having a state government that matches the money we take in.  It's probably time for all of that.

Maybe its' time to talk about building upon what we have, and actually realizing what that is.  And, as we can see from the above, in terms of private industry, that's agriculture, tourism and mineral extraction.  And, like it philosophically or not, we have a lot of government employment in this state and government entities that are pretty darned involved in some sectors of the economy, particularly oil and gas, already.

So, what do we have to build with?  Let's start with mineral extraction.

Mineral extraction?  Perhaps you're thinking "why I thought you were arguing against relying on that?"  No, I'm really not. I'm arguing that we have to be smart and realistic about that.

The boom and bust nature of much of the mineral industry is a feature of it that is pretty fixed, long established by history, and that's all largely beyond our control.  We have to accept that.  But these industries aren't going completely away.  Even coal, which is in real trouble, isn't going completely away and indeed even right now there's an effort by one coal company to start a mine near Sheridan.

The thing we can do, therefore, is to be smart in our planning on these industries.  And that would have to accept that they're going to have rocky periods.

We may also want to be very careful, and we very rarely are, about thinking that when times are good that they're going to go on forever.  There are those who will act that way and they nearly take any suggestion to the contrary as a hostile comment.  Planning for the crash ought to go on during the boom, rather than waiting until it occurs, and that's just smart.

It's also smart to recognize long term trends, none of which are hugely favorable towards the fossil fuel industry.  Recognizing that isn't being hostile, once again, it's just recognizing it.

And perhaps we also ought to at least ponder that, like the oil exporting nations of the Middle East, we really don't do much with the raw product anymore.  We did at one time with petroleum oil, in that we did refine it here, but we no longer do that.  Natural gas, because of its nature, is "refined", or rather processed here, and that will go on.  We ought to consider all of that, however.  We never processed the iron we mined, for example, even though we had all the things necessary to do it (except, perhaps, the large scale shipping necessary for that).

Now, at this point in time, I may have to admit that the ship has sailed on all of these things.  Down to a handful of refineries, I don't see that industry coming back.  There's a reason that super sized refineries are all located on the Gulf Coast.  But if we're not going to process our raw products here, maybe taxing slightly what we export would be a good idea.  Nothing radical, but to add a little bit of a tax in addition to the existing ones for what is departing would not impact the price and might help us out quite a bit in lean times, particularly based upon how the funds were earmarked.  And who knows, maybe that would encourage a little processing here as well.

All of which might do nothing at all, I'll concede.

Okay then, what about agriculture the one we ignore?

Well, here's something I think we can do a fair amount about.

Agriculture in the state has weathered all the storms. Everything we've ever raised or grown here we still do, we just don't do it in the same proportions as some prior eras, but that's not surprising. What we don't do is to process hardly anything here.  We don't pack any of the meat on a large scale.  We don't process any wool into woolens.  We don't mill any flour.  We don't do any of that.

Indeed, the only processing we do, and its a return to something we hadn't done in a long time, is to brew beer and bottle it and (and this is new) to distill grain and bottle that.

Maybe it's time to sit back and have one of those beers and ponder that.

There's a lot we can do here, but in some ways we have to be a bit bold and buck some trends.  There's a large multi-state industry devoted to processing remotely here, and to suggest we ought to do it locally means having to deal with that.

But it can be dealt with.

Let's start with the toughest aspect of that, the beef cattle industry.

At one time, Wyoming had at least one packing plant, indeed right here in Casper.  There was another just outside of the state in Scotsbluff, right over the border, and yet another in Denver.  There were probably others, including perhaps some in the state, but now there are none and all of those which I have mentioned are gone, although one remains in Greeley Colorado.

 February 1922 Casper Packing Company advertisement.

Now, they are gone because the meat packing industry has become amazingly consolidated and the profit margins in packing are, or at least were, low. But if the packing industry could be revived, it would be a natural for Wyoming.  We have everything it requires, at least in certain localities, that being cattle, agriculture for hay and feed corn, sufficient water, good roads and land.

The situation is similar when we consider sheep.  While the sheep industry has really taken a hit, it's slowly somewhat revived over the years and we do have sheep.  Sheep, as an agricultural animal, are interesting in that their primary crop is really wool, with meat being a secondary one.  The meat aspect of this is already addressed by the comments on beef above, but the wool part isn't.

Wool itself used to contribute quite a bit to the Wyoming economy in that there were wool buyers, sorters, and shearers, all in addition to the sheep ranchers, who employed themselves and their herders.  What we never had, however, was a woolen mill, to process raw wool into anything.  We could, but we don't.

This is also true of the milling industry; i.e., flour milling.

 

 Old elevator in Sheridan Wyoming. This elevator belonged to the Best Out West flour mill, and apparently this was the mill. The hotel next to it is named after the mill.  From Painted Bricks.

Wyoming grows a fair amount of grain, and grows it all over, even though we often do not seem to realize it.  Major agricultural areas can be found in southeastern Wyoming, west central Wyoming, northeastern Wyoming and northern Wyoming.  We grow a fair amount of wheat and corn and if milling facilities were here, we could go the next step.  We don't, however.

We've done better with sugar. We do have some sugar facilities serving, in particular, the Big Horn Basin. Those, it should be noted, are owned by co-ops that formed to operate them with the sugar companies pulled out of that area.  Elsewhere we haven't done as well with that.

Probably the one area that we've done well at recently that might point the way forward a bit is in the category of alcohol.  

A bottle of Wyoming Whiskey, depicted in a thread here on Lex Anteinternet.

I addressed the introduction of a local bourbon some time ago, indeed quite some time ago, on a thread that was once one of the most popular here on this page, that being The Rebirth Of Rye Whiskey And Nostalgia For 'The Good Stuff' & Beer and Prohibition.  That thread also addressed, a bit, the history of local beers.  On the whiskey, I noted; 

Wyoming Whiskey is a new brand of whiskey that's distilled in the tiny Hot Springs County town of Kirby.  It came about, according to what I've read, as the Meads purchased farm ground in the area in order to have a steady supply of corn for their cattle operation, and then hit upon the idea of distilling whiskey in the county.  Hot Springs County is otherwise famous for, well, hots springs, and is of course the location of Thermopolis, which features the same.

This trend has really continued since then, and there's apparently some sort of distillery in Teton County now as well, and there is one that is distilling a couple of different types of hard alcohol here in Natrona County.  I can't opine on the Teton County one at all, and I'm only aware of it as the state government recently turned down the request of an Idaho distiller for a grant to help relocate its headquarters over into the county, as another distiller opposed it.  For that matter, my experience with the local Natrona County distiller is limited to having had a single shot of its vodka, given to me by a friend as proof that not all vodka is bad.  While my position on vodka remains that the difference between the best vodka and the worst is the price, I have to say that I was impressed because . . . well, it didn't taste like vodka.

It's not only hard alcohol that's making inroads into Wyoming and processing the state's agricultural produce. Beer has made an amazing return in these regards.

Snake River Brewery in Jackson Wyoming.

I've commented on this before, but here too the trend has really developed.  And to an amazing extent.  There are now breweries in quite a few Wyoming towns putting out a really high quality product.  This industry has gone from one which, a few years ago, would have required a person to hunt for a Wyoming beer (and a few years before that there were none) to one in which a person could easily buy beer on any occasional and always find a high quality Wyoming beer of any type.  It's really amazing.  

Indeed, Wyoming beer is even canned now.  That may not seem so amazing, but a brewery has to put out quite a bit of beer before they begin canning it.  But that's now going on.  Indeed, beer is the Distributist Economic champion of Wyoming.

This revival, it should be noted, represents a return of an industry that once was all over and very local.  Casper, which recently saw local beer return at The Wonder Bar, an bar that dates back forever in Casper's history, once had a regional brewer in the form of Hillcrest Brewery.  

Bottles from Hillcrest Lager Beer, a beer that was once brewed locally but is no more. Casper doesn't bottle any beer anymore, but it does brew it once again.

There are even a couple of winerys in Wyoming. I don't know anything about them, other than that they exist, but this is additional evidence that at least in terms of processing a local agricultural product into a finished one, alcohol leads the way.

Okay, its one thing to point all of these things out, but what of it.  We don't have packing plants, mills, etc.  What, a person might ask, do you propose?

Well, I'd propose something that Wyomingites hate, state assistance for private enterprise, or even direct involvement in it.

Now, before people have their hackles up too much, let me point out that we only oppose this to a limited degree.  We're actually okay, based on our track records, of supporting start ups with grants.  We're also okay with investing in doubtful technologies, if they relate to the mineral industry.  Witness there all the money the state is sinking into Clean Coal Technology.  I'm not opposed to that by any means, but we must admit that the chances of it ever paying off are remote.

So, before we get too much further, let us consider North Dakota Mill and Elevator.

Eh?

Postcard of the North Dakota State Mill, 1915.

While nearly a neighboring state (it doesn't border us, but you can sprint across the corner of South Dakota and be there in no time at all), North Dakota, which we will return to when we discuss education, has a really different cultural history compared to Wyoming.  With a heavily Scandinavian immigrant population from early in the 20th Century, North Dakota had and still has a political culture that, quite frankly, was occasionally sympathetic to socialism.

Now, let me be frank, I'm not terribly sympathetic with socialism, but we can take a page out of an example of something that works, if it works.  And here's something that has worked for North Dakota.

It's a state owned operation, formed to address problems that farmers were experiencing, but it doesn't receive a subsidy from the state and its self supporting.  

This is the same model used by the other Dakota, South Dakota, for South Dakota Cement, an operation so successful that it has expanded even recently and markets its product in every state bordering South Dakota.  It even had a plant, at one time, here in Casper.

Now, I'm not suggesting that we need state run or owned industries everywhere.  But perhaps we can take an example where there isn't a private industry.  Critics would say, and they should be listened to, that if a private industry isn't operating it's for a good reason. But, we also have to admit that there are a fair number of industries that get their start from some sort of government support.  Indeed, the entire transcontinental railroad was such an example, getting state support in the form of massive land grants, which is essentially the same as a massive infusion of capital.  There's no reason to pretend otherwise.

So, where we don't have a local industry, perhaps we should consider if the state should help. The state's already helping the coal and petroleum industries via various studies at the University of Wyoming, including clean coal.  The very day I wrote this part of this entry, Governor Mead was appearing on the front page of the Tribune at a state funded facility studying clean coal.  And let's not forget the pile of administrative entities that help business one way or another, from the Farmers Home Administration to the Small Business Administration.

So, suing the North and South Dakota models, could the state infest in the infrastructure for milling, packing and wool processing?  Perhaps it could. And, after an initial start up, perhaps it could require those industries to run on a self-sufficient basis.

Now, granted, this is a species of socialism, albeit of an odd type that differs from the classic economy destroying the government owns everything variety.  The concept would only be, on sort of  Distributist basis, to form those entities aiding major Wyoming industries where we aren't able to finish the product ourselves on an reasonably economic level.  We can't, for example, create refineries and have them compete.  Nor power plants. But packing plants are another matter, and mills are a demonstrated different matter.  This wouldn't bring in an economic miracle by any means, but it would allow us to further make use of the resources that we do have, right here. And there would be a market for the product, including a small market right here, in that the state is already in the lunch business for kids up to age 19.  Moreover, tags like "Wyoming beef" do have a local price and maybe even a regional one that could be useful for a product grown and finished here, and that is already the case.

One of the things that state and local government do spend money on is tourism.  That's fine, and that's already been addressed by the fine post on Neil Waring's blog that I mentioned earlier.  So I'll forgo going into that in depth, other than to mention that I really think that tourism is an offshoot of agriculture.  Let's face it, without agriculture, tourism in Wyoming would be Yellowstone National Park, and that's about it.  Sure, we have other things, but agriculture keeps them going.

That circles us back around, I suppose, to government. Right now all the local governments are contracting.  Everyone is out of money, and given the means by which the state raises money, that makes sense. But what's the long term impact of that?

Probably bad.  Construction contracts are actually keeping the state's economy from sinking into a real disaster right now.  Major construction projects, funded some time ago, are big deals in the cities where they are occurring.  That isn't an argument for deficit funding, but it is an argument for both planning ahead and figuring out what a more stable source of funding for state government may be.  It doesn't seem to me that the state spending every got truly out of control, although the last couple of years some really big projects were funded.  We're not going to be able to keep that going at the level it was at, unless we figure out another funding source. We probably ought to be able to do that at least in part, however.  We should consider it, not because we should build just to build, but because we have to acknowledge the construction has been necessary and in some instances (like the lack of a swimming pool at one of the local high schools)  actually underdone because it was too local.  I'm not proposing an income tax for the state, but we ought to reconsider how we tax.

As part of that, we can also consider what we don't tax, and that may prove to be an incentive in addition.  Not taxing start up industries on their land is a possibility, for example.  On the flip side of that, Wyoming could take a page out of some Mid Western states books and restrict the corporate form in some instances which would favor local entities.  For example, there's no really good reason to encourage land to be idled as a type of playground if it could be used by local agriculturalists.  Distributist, of whom there are few of course, would go further and attempt to restrict the corporate form for large retain in order to encourage small retail.  But that latter approach is not done anywhere in the US at the present time.

Another thing we should be considering is education.  This has been a long embattled topic in the state but we really ought to ponder it. Most Wyoming school districts do really well but we have seen the unfortunate rise of battles at the state administrative level in the last few years, much of which had to do with a person's political concepts.  Let's hope that's over.  Beyond that, we've also seen the gerrymandering of school placement in order that high schools cold keep their athletic classifications, which is absurd.  Notable examples of that have occurred in Campbell and Natrona counties.  That ought to cease in part because it might cause high schools to be built as real high schools, rather than as campuses or special facilities, a trend which ought to be stopped.

More importantly however this would be a good time to expand post high school education.  Indeed the University of Wyoming and the community colleges already are anticipating a crush of new students from the recently laid off mineral sector economy.  That's fine, but perhaps this is a time to expand what we've already been doing, which is to convert more of the community colleges into four year institutions.  This was a big battle back in the 1970s which saw UW pitted against the community colleges and which resolved in an armistice which saw UW steadily expand onto community college grounds.  Now Casper College, for example, offers a fair number of four year degrees through the UW extension there. This ought to be encouraged and expanded, as its been done very well.

Now, I admit all of my ideas placed here are not silver bullets  Maybe none of them would do much.  But I expect they would.  We have a selection of industries based on the land that we're under utilizing.  None of them will result in high dollar wages in the same way as the oilfield did, but they might offer steady employment while needed, and form a base for local economic expansion.  Tourism is going to have to keep on keeping on.   Government spending is something we hate here, but we actually employ a lot, and we may wish to find ways to keep funding the necessary construction that we require, as right now, that's keeping our economy afloat.

So what do you think?

Mid Week at Work: Making the sale, 1916

Chinese merchants and U.S. troops, Casas Grandes Mexico, 1916.

Lamenting the change in the Christmas Season. . .?

I recently heard two podcasts by a fellow who was lamenting the passing of the traditional Christmas season.  I sort of like the particular podcast, but I'll admit that it tends to be a bit snarky in what I think is sort of an over snarky way.  And it also features an interview, normally, of the same fellow by the same captive interviewer, which makes the style a bit problematic as the interviewer, in that context, is a bit captive.

 Christmas Tree, Madison Square Garden, 1915.

Anyhow, the fellow's point was that we now have an American (largely Protestant) Christmas that starts well before the liturgical Christmas Season and concludes well before Christmas, and we've lost the traditional Christmas Season entirely.  He maintains that this is the result of an intentional effort by American politicians to boost the Christmas marketing season and that this goes back to the early 20th Century.  And in support of it, he twice cited the absence of a celebration of the Twelve Days of Christmas.

Hmmm. . . .

I don't know, but frankly, I doubt his point here.

This isn't to say that Christmas hasn't become hyper commercialized, but the commercial, i.e., the gift giving aspect of it, is hardly a new thing.  And it isn't entirely a bad one either.

Before we look at that, however, let's look at his point, to the extent he has one.

 

St. Mary's Cathedral, Cheyenne Wyoming.  The cathedral for the Catholic Diocese of Cheyenne.

Liturgically, the pre Christmas season is Advent.  The United States Council of Catholic Bishops defines advent this way:

Beginning the Church's liturgical year, Advent (from, "ad-venire" in Latin or "to come to") is the season encompassing the four Sundays (and weekdays) leading up to the celebration of Christmas.

The Advent season is a time of preparation that directs our hearts and minds to Christ’s second coming at the end of time and also to the anniversary of the Lord’s birth on Christmas. The final days of Advent, from December 17 to December 24, focus particularly on our preparation for the celebrations of the Nativity of our Lord (Christmas).

Advent devotions including the Advent wreath, remind us of the meaning of the season. Our Advent calendar above can help you fully enter in to the season with daily activity and prayer suggestions to prepare you spiritually for the birth of Jesus Christ.  More Advent resources are listed below.

The 1917 Catholic Encyclopedia, a valuable resource which is frequenlty made resort to by traditional minded Catholics and those who look towards Catholic tradition, holds:

According to present usage, Advent is a period beginning with the Sunday nearest to the feast of St. Andrew the Apostle and embracing four Sundays. The first Sunday may be as early as 27 November, and then Advent has twenty-eight days, or as late as 3 December, giving the season only twenty-one days.
With Advent the ecclesiastical year begins in the Western churches. During this time the faithful are admonished

• to prepare themselves worthily to celebrate the anniversary of the Lord's coming into the world as the incarnate God of love,
• thus to make their souls fitting abodes for the Redeemer coming in Holy Communion and through grace, and
• thereby to make themselves ready for His final coming as judge, at death and at the end of the world.

Symbolism

To attain this object the Church has arranged the Liturgy for this season. In the official prayer, the Breviary, she calls upon her ministers, in the Invitatory for Matins, to adore "the Lord the King that is to come", "the Lord already near", "Him Whose glory will be seen on the morrow". As Lessons for the first Nocturn she prescribes chapters from the prophet Isaias, who speaks in scathing terms of the ingratitude of the house of Israel, the chosen children who had forsaken and forgotten their Father; who tells of the Man of Sorrows stricken for the sins of His people; who describes accurately the passion and death of the coming Saviour and His final glory; who announces the gathering of the Gentiles to the Holy Hill. In the second Nocturn the Lessons on three Sundays are taken from the eighth homily of Pope St. Leo (440-461) on fasting and almsdeeds as a preparation for the advent of the Lord, and on one Sunday (the second) from St. Jerome's commentary on Isaiah 11:1, which text he interprets of the Blessed Virgin Mary as "the rod out of the root of Jesse". In the hymns of the season we find praise for the coming of Christ, the Creator of the universe, as Redeemer, combined with prayer to the coming judge of the world to protect us from the enemy. Similar ideas are expressed in the antiphons for the Magnificat on the last seven days before the Vigil of the Nativity. In them, the Church calls on the Divine Wisdom to teach us the way of prudence; on the Key of David to free us from bondage; on the Rising Sun to illuminate us sitting in darkness and the shadow of death, etc. In the Masses the intention of the Church is shown in the choice of the Epistles and Gospels. In the Epistle she exhorts the faithful that, since the Redeemer is nearer, they should cast aside the works of darkness and put on the armour of light; should walk honestly, as in the day, and put on the Lord Jesus Christ; she shows that the nations are called to praise the name of the Lord; she asks them to rejoice in the nearness of the Lord, so that the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, may keep their hearts and minds in Christ Jesus; she admonishes them not to pass judgment, for the Lord, when He comes, will manifest the secrets hidden in hearts. In the Gospels the Church speaks of the Lord coming in glory; of Him in, and through, Whom the prophecies are being fulfilled; of the Eternal walking in the midst of the Jews; of the voice in the desert, "Prepare ye the way of the Lord". The Church in her Liturgy takes us in spirit back to the time before the incarnation of the Son of God, as though it were really yet to take place. Cardinal Wiseman says:

We are not dryly exhorted to profit by that blessed event, but we are daily made to sigh with the Fathers of old, "Send down the dew, ye heavens, from above, and let the clouds rain the Just One: let the earth be opened, and bud forth the Redeemer." The Collects on three of the four Sundays of that season begin with the words, "Lord, raise up thy power and come" — as though we feared our iniquities would prevent His being born.

Duration and ritual

On every day of Advent the Office and Mass of the Sunday or Feria must be said, or at least a Commemoration must be made of them, no matter what grade of feast occurs. In the Divine Office the Te Deum, the joyful hymn of praise and thanksgiving, is omitted; in the Mass the Gloria in excelsis is not said. The Alleluia, however, is retained. During this time the solemnization of matrimony (Nuptial Mass and Benediction) cannot take place; which prohibition binds to the feast of Epiphany inclusively. The celebrant and sacred ministers use violet vestments. The deacon and subdeacon at Mass, in place of the dalmatics commonly used, wear folded chasubles. The subdeacon removes his during the reading of the Epistle, and the deacon exchanges his for another, or for a wider stole, worn over the left shoulder during the time between the singing of the Gospel and the Communion. An exception is made for the third Sunday (Gaudete Sunday), on which the vestments may be rose-coloured, or richer violet ones; the sacred ministers may on this Sunday wear dalmatics, which may also be used on the Vigil of the Nativity, even if it be the fourth Sunday of Advent. Pope Innocent III (1198-1216) states that black was the colour to be used during Advent, but violet had already come into use for this season at the end of the thirteenth century. Binterim says that there was also a law that pictures should be covered during Advent. Flowers and relics of Saints are not to be placed on the altars during the Office and Masses of this time, except on the third Sunday; and the same prohibition and exception exist in regard to the use of the organ. The popular idea that the four weeks of Advent symbolize the four thousand years of darkness in which the world was enveloped before the coming of Christ finds no confirmation in the Liturgy.

Historical origin

It cannot be determined with any degree of certainty when the celebration of Advent was first introduced into the Church. The preparation for the feast of the Nativity of Our Lord was not held before the feast itself existed, and of this we find no evidence before the end of the fourth century, when, according to Duchesne [Christian Worship (London, 1904), 260], it was celebrated throughout the whole Church, by some on 25 December, by others on 6 January. Of such a preparation we read in the Acts of a synod held at Saragossa in 380, whose fourth canon prescribes that from the seventeenth of December to the feast of the Epiphany no one should be permitted to absent himself from church. We have two homilies of St. Maximus, Bishop of Turin (415-466), entitled "In Adventu Domini", but he makes no reference to a special time. The title may be the addition of a copyist. There are some homilies extant, most likely of St. Caesarius, Bishop of Arles (502-542), in which we find mention of a preparation before the birthday of Christ; still, to judge from the context, no general law on the matter seems then to have been in existence. A synod held (581) at Mâcon, in Gaul, by its ninth canon orders that from the eleventh of November to the Nativity the Sacrifice be offered according to the Lenten rite on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday of the week. The Gelasian Sacramentary notes five Sundays for the season; these five were reduced to four by Pope St. Gregory VII (1073-85). The collection of homilies of St. Gregory the Great (590-604) begins with a sermon for the second Sunday of Advent. In 650 Advent was celebrated in Spain with five Sundays. Several synods had made laws about fasting to be observed during this time, some beginning with the eleventh of November, others the fifteenth, and others as early as the autumnal equinox. Other synods forbade the celebration of matrimony. In the Greek Church we find no documents for the observance of Advent earlier than the eighth century. St. Theodore the Studite (d. 826), who speaks of the feasts and fasts commonly celebrated by the Greeks, makes no mention of this season. In the eighth century we find it observed not as a liturgical celebration, but as a time of fast and abstinence, from 15 November to the Nativity, which, according to Goar, was later reduced to seven days. But a council of the Ruthenians (1720) ordered the fast according to the old rule from the fifteenth of November. This is the rule with at least some of the Greeks. Similarly, the Ambrosian and the Mozarabic Riterites have no special liturgy for Advent, but only the fast.

 

 Holy Transfiguration of  Christ Orthodox Cathedral, a Russian Orthodox cathedral in Denver Colorado.

Advent is most definitely observed in the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church.  It's also observed in observed in the Eastern Rite of the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches, which have traditionally  had a Lent like observance of Advent.  Regarding this, the Orthodox Church in America, branch of the Orthodox that had their origin with the Russian Orthodox Church, provides:

We fast before the Great Feast of the Nativity in order to prepare ourselves for the celebration of Our Lord’s birth. As in the case of Great Lent, the Nativity Fast is one of preparation, during which we focus on the coming of the Savior by fasting, prayer, and almsgiving.

By fasting, we “shift our focus” from ourselves to others, spending less time worrying about what to eat, when to eat, how much to eat, and so on in order to use our time in increased prayer and caring for the poor. We learn through fasting that we can gain control over things which we sometimes allow to control us—and for many people, food is a controlling factor. 

[We live in the only society in which an entire TV network is devoted to food!] While fasting from food, however, we are also challenged to fast from sin, from gossip, from jealousy, from anger, and from those other things which, while well within our control, we all too often allow to control us.

Just as we would refrain from eating a lot before going to an expensive restaurant for dinner—if we “ruin our appetite” we will enjoy the restaurant less—so too we fast before the Nativity in order to more fully feast and celebrate on the Nativity itself.

During the Nativity Fast, we are called upon to refrain from meat, dairy, fish, wine, and olive oil. At the same time, we are challenged, within this framework, to fast to the best of our ability, and to do so consistently. 

If we must modify the extent to which we fast within this framework, it is of course possible, but in every instance our fasting should be consistent and regular, for Christ does not see fasting as an option, but as a “must.”

In Matthew Christ says, “WHEN you fast, do not be like the hypocrites,” not “IF you fast” or “IF YOU CHOOSE to fast.”

Finally, it seems quite odd that in our society—a society in which people gladly and freely spend huge sums of money for diets, most of which recommend that one refrain from red meats and dairy products—fasting is not more widely embraced. How odd that a Jenny Craig consultant or diet guru or physician will tell us to refrain from eating meat or cheese or butter and we will gladly embrace—and pay large sums of money for—his or her advice, while when the Church offers the same advice [at “no cost”] we tend to balk, as if we were being asked to do the impossible.

Okay, you may not be seeing any of that, right?  So does that mean that Christmas as a Christian holiday has really fallen off and isn't property observed?  No, probably not.  The number of Orthodox in the United States isn't large (which doesn't mean its insignificant), and the Eastern Rite of the Catholic Church, in recognition of their small size, generally modify their Advent customs somewhat. The Catholic Church is large, but then again, Catholics do observe Advent. That many Protestants really don't isn't surprising, as their history with it is significantly different.

Indeed, the Puritans, often cited as an example of tor original founding Americans, banned Christmas in both the United States and England. That's right, they banned it. And that sort of thing is exactly what lead to the English Restoration in England, and the dim view that was held of them there that caused them to have to take refuge first in Holland and then in North America.  So, for people who hold the "war on Christmas" view of things, the original hostility to Christmas in this country goes back as far as the same group of people we cite as founding Thanksgiving here.

Of course, it was exactly this sort of thing that caused Cromwell to posthumously lose his head.

Anyhow, going on, the same commenter referenced the "Twelve Days of Christmas" more than once, noting that few even are aware that the Christmas season commences on Christmas itself and then runs for twelve days, assuming that it does.

In actuality,that reference is a bit complicated.  It is the case that Christmastide is a feature of most Christian denominations in some fashion, although it's also the case that probably very few average people are aware of that.

Not all Christian denominations calculate Christmastide the same way.  In the Catholic Church, which most Christians in the west look to for the liturgical year, the Christmas season is longer than twelve days, although not by much, and runs from Christmas to Epiphany.  Catholics do observe that on their liturgical calendar.  In the Eastern Church this is also true, but it isn't calculated in quite the same fashion on their liturgical calendar.  The Anglican and Lutheran churches use a strait twelve days from Christmas, with the twelfth day being called Twelfth Night. Their calculation relies on the Latin Rite liturgical calendar, but the custom dates to a calendar that was in use at the time of their separation.

And here's where things get complicated.  It was indeed the case that these twelve days were once festive in character, with the onset of Christmas having broken the fasting of Advent.  The observation of the Advent fast was itself more strict to some degree in the West than it currently is, where it isn't observed at all. Rather obviously, in the Eastern Church, it still is observed.  Adding to that, the twelve day festival in the dead of winter was no doubt heavily looked forward to by people in what would have been otherwise a dreary indoor seasons.  Note also that the twelve days incorporated New Years Day within it, which is a Holy Day of Obligation in the Eastern and the Latin Rites of the Catholic Church, so in terms of the liturgical year a season commencing on Christmas and ending on Epiphany makes a great deal of sense and it retains a bit of its festive nature even today.

What is missing, however, is a public ongoing celebration of the seasons, such as celebrated in the somewhat dreaded Christmas song, the Twelve Days of Christmas.  But that parties and whatnot occurred is in fact correct.  Indeed, the legendary concluding party in A Christmas Carol in which Fezziwig dances with his workers takes place on Twelth Night.

Fezziwig gets down at the Twelfth Night Party.

So all is lost, right?

Well, I don't know.

Frankly, I think the point has been pushed too far.

Indeed, the lamenting on how commercial Christmas has become is a modern Christmas tradition and hardly new to our age.  The great G. K. Chesterton, whom I genuinely admire, noted in the first half of the the last century:

The same sort of ironic injustice is applied to any old popular festival like Christmas. Moving step by step, in the majestic march of Progress, we have first vulgarised Christmas and then denounced it as vulgar. Christmas has become too commercial; so many of these thinkers would destroy the Christmas that has been spoiled, and preserve the commercialism that has spoiled it.

Sounds like a very modern commentary (although much of Chesterton's work has as disturbingly prophetic nature to it ).

Perhaps it seems to connected, however, as already by the early 20th Century the modern gift giving Christmas we are used to already existed.  And indeed, it did.

It's very clear that the practice of giving gifts on Christmas was well established well prior to 1900.  Probably the only real change in the past century isn't that, but rather the onset of a consumer culture has emphasized it, and that too goes back about a century.

 Shoppers checking out a Christmas display in 1915.

Consumerism has undoubtedly made ongoing inroads into Christmas.  Now many stores don't balance their books for the year until Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, which is called that as that's the day their accounts hopefully go into the "black" and out of the "red".  But that's being going on for awhile.

Granted.  It hasn't been going on to the same extent that it is now, and the ongoing relentless advance of consumeristic thought and behavior has impacted things.  But not just as to Christmas, but as to seemingly everything in western life.  As societies have become richer, and more accepting of consumer debt, this behavior has expanded everywhere in the west.

But that didn't lead to a demise in the society wide celebration of the Twelve Days of Christmas. That declined on its own.

And that it would decline in the US is not surprising.  In spite of the observation of the commenter, this would really have been a public observance in that fashion very early in the country's history, when it was mostly English.  The observation of Epiphany elsewhere amongst Europeans, and Middle Eastern Christians, would have been real, but of a different character.  And the fact that the United States was so early on home to a number of dissenting Protestant denominations would have at least made some inroads into what was basically an Anglican tradition.

And indeed, in the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, the observations really continue on, but just not quite in the same fashion as imagined by a Twelve Days of Christmas, but then it never matched that description.

But, going back to the lack of twelve day long holiday, why additionally would that have occurred?  Well, we really have to accept that this is something that lasted no longer, in that form, than the early 19th Century.  And the disappearance of isn't too surprising.

First of all, once again, it's really an English holiday we're discussing.  And sort of rural English one at that.  By the early 19th Century that England was disappearing very rapidly in favor of the industrialized England that came on rapidly behind it. Even in Dicken's A Christmas Carol the change is manifestly noted, and in part the work laments that change. Scrooge can be seen not only a a miser, but the emblem of industrial England.  He wasn't celebrating a twelve day holiday and was limiting the time off of his employees to Christmas alone. Sound familiar?  Well, that's because that's largely what happened in industrial societies, with usually a single day or two around a major holiday, like Christmas, also included (Boxing Day remains a holiday in countries with large English influence).

And indeed, that was inevitable.  In a rural setting, a series of feasts lasting more than a week long is not difficult to create.  In an industrial setting, however, that's not the case.  Most modern urban workplaces can't idle for more than a few days before dire things begin to occur to them, no matter what they are.

And, as noted, in the United States this distinctly English spin on the season wasn't going to last.  As an Anglican observation, the mere presence right from the onset of competing denominations would impact that.  One of those traditions, Puritanism, was hostile to Christmas itself at its origin.  Once members of other faiths, such as Catholics, arrived, the nature of an English Anglican observation was going to diminish in any event.

 Family with their Christmas Tree, 1915.  The Christmas Tree is a German tradition, incorporated in the American holiday.  Presents can be seen near the tree.

None of that really means that the holiday has somehow become un-observed, however.  By late 19th Century it was already a holiday that varied by community, with elements of various cultures mixing their traditions.  The religious nature of the holiday, in spite of the sometimes declared belief that there's a "war on Christmas" continues on, even in a country that has some substantial non Christian populations.  Indeed, Christmas has been so pervasive that some observation of the season is generally acknowledged by some non Christians, if only in a muted secular fashion.

Yes, it does seem that the commercial nature of the season has expanded. But then the consumer nature of everything has.  That might have less to do with Christmas than we suppose, and more to do with a culture that's completely adopted a consumer mindset, which is a problem in its own right, but a distinct problem.

Anyhow, Merry Christmas. And enjoy Epiphany as well.