When did people start carrying cups of coffee around with them all the time? I can’t remember, though I know it happened in my lifetime. It certainly wasn’t something my parents did. I started drinking coffee in my early twenties, so in the late-1980s, but don’t remember walking around carrying a coffee cup everywhere, and never really got in the habit of doing so.

I’ve thought about this a lot: when did we go from being people who drank coffee at home, and in coffee shops or restaurants, to people who move through the world tethered to coffee shops like Tarzan swung through the jungle, swinging from shop to shop? Visiting Tim Horton’s has become a quasi-religious act in Canada, the doughnut and double-double the Eucharist. Father, son and honey crueller. If you don’t drink Timmie’s and watch hockey, are you really Canadian?

In the “Things Have Change But I Can’t Remember When” category is the impression I have that the Christmas season starts earlier and earlier each year. I think that when I was a child, people were sensible and talk of Christmas only started on December 1, but I realise that’s probably a false memory, or wishful thinking that we could revert to living only in the season we are in: enjoying the present, not anticipating the presents!

Proof of my false memory is found in an October 15, 1948 ad heralding the opening of Toy Town at the Summerside department store, Smallman’s. They couldn’t resist sticking Santa on there, his happy grin silently but powerfully sanctioning the quality of the store’s offerings.

Smallman’s was still in business when I was a child. We shopped mostly at their larger rival, Holman’s, just down Water Street, but sometimes we ventured into Smallman’s for sales or to visit their lunch counter. My father had worked in their warehouse before the Second World War when it was called Sinclair and Stewarts, so he especially liked going back.

Their main floor was one huge room, with office windows overlooking the sales floor. When you wanted to purchase something, a handwritten bill of sale was created, you gave the sales clerk your money, and a copy of the bill, along with your cash, was put into a small box that was put on a little railway-type system that took the money up to the cash office. Any change required was put back into the box, along with a receipt marked paid, and it clattered back down to the clerk. The fun of watching the little boxes zipping up pillars and along the ceiling was endlessly fascinating, really the best part of going there.

And when did that little railway stop?