An Ode to Xmas Present David W. Jardine, University of Calgary Please don't let me fear anything I cannot explain. I can't believe I'll never believe In anything again. from Elvis Costello, "Couldn't Call it Unexpected No. 4" (1991) (Pope, 2015) It is always rather disturbing to discover that something that I have felt or believed or been resigned to or took to be true is a fabrication that has no necessity to it at all. There is a terrible vertigo that comes in finding that believing it to be permanent or beyond question or fixed is just the outcome of causes and conditions that have fallen from memory and view. Such occluding amnesia is, it seems, a perennial part of the human condition. It makes my intimate and heartfelt experiences seem immediate and obvious and "simply the way things are." A life of semblance has its own comforts, of course. Such "moon‐sickness" (p. 25) makes it hard to see straight after recent events, and not let the inherited‐and‐forgotten immediacies of media flurries turn to white outs and skidding off the road. Nice Canadian metaphors, eh? There is nothing necessary about freedom of speech just as there is nothing necessary about real or feigned religious affrontery. Such things only persist in the persistence of one or another kind of "attention and devotion" (Berry 1986, p. 33). Even studious claims of "false flag operations" (Barrett 2015)