Shades of Victorian Fashion: Orange, Pumpkin, and Peach

The Victorians loved vibrant colors. From Mimi Matthews:

Unlike popular autumnal shades, such as golds, browns, and burnished reds, the Victorians generally regarded the color orange with disfavor. Fashion magazines of the day advised against wearing orange dresses, calling the color ugly and claiming that it was unflattering to every complexion. Even worse, as fashion historian C. Willett Cunnington reports, some believed that the color orange implied “a degree of animal passion which the pure ought not to possess.” I had not intended to give orange an article of its own, but it’s Halloween today and I can think of no better occasion to showcase a selection of this much maligned—but nonetheless striking—shade of Victorian fashion. (Read more.)

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No, Europe Did Not Just Tell Its Citizens to Prepare for World War III

 From The Enterprise:

Germany’s 10 days, the scariest number on the list, comes from the federal civil defense concept published in 2016, which also advised 5 days of water. The Bundestag recorded the figure in October, during the Obama administration. Since then, it has been revised to 10 days of food and drink, and it now sits on the Federal Office of Civil Protection website beside a checklist that reads like the back of a Boy Scout handbook.

Sweden has been at this since 1943, when the government mailed every household a booklet called If War Comes. New editions went out in 1952 and 1961, another in 2018, and the latest in November 2024, which tells households to manage for at least a week without electricity, running water, or a working grocery store. The edition now circulating on 𝕏 is titled If Crisis or War Comes, and that title does most of the work for the panic merchants.

The word war is right there on the cover, and the other governments use it too. The EU strategy lists geopolitical crisis among its hazards. The British campaign calls itself practical preparation for disruptions to essential services, and nobody in Whitehall pretends Russia isn’t among the things that could disrupt them. A risk register lists what could happen; treating it as a forecast of what will happen is the error every one of these posts commits. A hospital keeps a plan for a plane crash, and the plan is not evidence that a plane is coming. Sweden printed war on its cover in 1943, 1952, and 1961, and no Soviet division ever landed on Gotland. (Read more.)

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Halloween and Catholicism

May 13, which is the feast of Our Lady, Queen of All Martyrs, was the original All Saints Day. So the origins of All Saints and Halloween had nothing to do with Samhain, as some people seem to think. Later, the Pope changed All Saints from May to November because after the harvest there was more food in Rome to feed the pilgrims. And for other reasons, as told in the article. From uCatholic:

The practice of a festival day to honor the whole communion of Saints, rather than that just a single saint, seems to happen for the first time in the Catholic Church with the consecration of the Pantheon as a public place for the Church’s worship. This happened in the year 609 (or 610) on May 13th. The Pantheon had been originally dedicated for the use of Roman religion as a place where all the gods would be honored. Boniface displaced the images of the gods from their shrines and gave the building over to the Saints of the Church, particularly the Martyrs. This was a kind of “in your face” to pagan culture. Boniface was saying that the old gods had been defeated and were defeated by the faith of the Church’s Martyrs. 

Also, May 13th was a day associated in Roman religion with what was called the festival of the Lemurs or ancestral spirits. It is likely that Boniface’s choice of this day to claim the Pantheon for Christian worship was intentional and it was a way of saying that the Martyrs are the great ancestors of all the baptized and it is their memory and witness that is rightly honored on the day that Romans recalled their ancestors. 

How we get from May 13th to November 1st is interesting. The festival of All Saints seems to emerge from the dedication of another Roman church that was consecrated by Pope Gregory III. The church is named St. Peter and all the Saints. It was a subsequent pope, Gregory IV, who extended the annual festival that commemorates this church dedication to the whole Church as All Saints Day. The extension of festivals specific to the Church of Rome is an part and parcel of how the Catholic Faith becomes the underlying cultural matrix from which a new kind of European civilization would emerge. (Read more.)

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Secret Numbers and Royal Betrayal: Queen Henrietta Maria’s Coded Letters to King Charles I in 1642

 

 From The Writing Desk:

How a queen’s secret correspondence helped sustain the Royalist cause as England descended into civil war.

One of the challenges in writing about the English Civil War is the number of ‘rabbit holes’ to distract me. One example is exploring the wealth of secret correspondence between the king and queen. 

In the summer of 1642, England faced catastrophe. King Charles I and Parliament reached an impasse, armies gathered, and Queen Henrietta Maria was in The Hague, working to raise money and secure the weapons her husband desperately needed. The problem was a letter could be intercepted, its contents exposed, and the information used against the Crown.

Henrietta Maria and Charles relied on secret codes or ‘ciphers’. Their letters were more than messages between husband and wife. They were full of information about money, military supplies, diplomatic negotiations and people whose loyalties might determine the outcome of the coming war.

As part of my research into this I bought a copy of the original letters from Queen Henrietta Maria to Charles I, including correspondence written in ciphers. These letters provide a fascinating glimpse into a secret world, hidden behind an apparently meaningless string of numbers. (Read more.)

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Strengthening Social Security for Future Generations

 From Stone Cold Truth:

For years, certain free-market conservatives have dismissed Social Security as a bankrupt, compulsory government Ponzi scheme. They pointed to demographics, political raiding of the trust funds, and a worker-to-beneficiary ratio that has collapsed from over 40-to-1 in the early decades to under 3-to-1 today. The actuarial math looked grim enough that those critics appeared headed for vindication.

Trustees reports have long projected the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance trust fund’s exhaustion in the early 2030s. After that point, incoming payroll taxes would cover only about 78 percent of scheduled benefits. That trajectory has shifted under President Trump.

Social Security Administration Commissioner Frank Bisignano, a trustee of the system, has stated plainly that the program “will be around for another 90 years.”

“This is a long journey. It’s 90 years old, and it’ll be around for another 90 years,” he said. “The president has promised to protect and preserve and that’s what we’re doing.”

The change rests on concrete actions. These include stronger anti-fraud measures, tax relief for seniors, and—most fundamentally—a growing economy that generates the revenue any safety net requires.

President Trump eliminated federal income taxes on Social Security for the vast majority of beneficiaries through the One Big Beautiful Bill. This delivered the largest tax break for seniors in history and fulfilled a core campaign promise. Roughly 88 to 90 percent of recipients will now pay no federal tax on their benefits, keeping more of what they earned through decades of work. This is not merely relief. It reinforces the program’s legitimacy as a return on contributions rather than a pure transfer. (Read more.)

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The Cultural History of ‘The Addams Family’

 From 2019 in Smithsonian:

In the summer of 1938, a determined salesman dropped in on a haunted mansion to peddle his “vibrationless, noiseless” vacuum doubling as both a “great time and a back saver” that “no well-appointed home should without.” It was a single-panel cartoon on page nine of The New Yorker fetching the author a tidy $85 sum. It introduced the world to an unnamed brood that will, once again, be returning to the big screen on Friday.

Mysterious and spooky and all together ooky, the Addams Family is back, this time as an animated big screen version to deliver Halloween frights for young fans meeting them anew and for old-timers who remember the original cartoons hatched in the twisted mind of artist Charles Addams. Throughout their various iterations, the family has cemented itself in the mausoleum of pop horror culture history, which to some degree is strange within itself. Unlike Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolfman, or any of the machete-wielding madmen at the multiplex, the Addamses have been both surprisingly difficult to forget but equally challenging to bring back to life. How exactly did they find themselves in this kooky situation? Let’s fire up the Packard V-12 hearse and take a spin down Memory (0001 Cemetery) Lane...(Read more.)

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Rosary of Marie-Antoinette

 From NCR:

Marie Antoinette had given the rosary to an Irish missionary priest, Father Henry Essex Edgeworth, otherwise known as Abbé Edgeworth, who was then chaplain to her husband, King Louis XVI. When the king was guillotined in January 1793, Abbé Edgeworth fled to England for safety and took refuge at the home of the Earl of Shrewsbury. Abbé Edgeworth eventually returned to France to continue his missionary work and left the rosary with the Shrewsbury family. It was then handed down through the generations, eventually ending up with Mary Fortescue-Turville, a previous owner of Bosworth Hall who died at the property in 1906. The rosary, one of several Marie Antoinette is thought to have given away, was then kept at the hall and has remained there ever since. (Read more.)

Marie-Antoinette receiving Holy Communion in prison

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Lawsuit Against Amendment #1 Moves Forward

 From Virginia Medical Freedom Alliance:

Victoria Cobb published on October 26, 2026

“Late last week, our case challenging the legality of the proposed Abortion Amendment just got a big boost. The Tazewell Circuit Court denied the Commonwealth’s motions that sought to prevent our hearing from going forward the week after the election if the Abortion Amendment passes. Now, our FFLC attorneys will be in court on November 13 fighting this Amendment.

Please be in prayer for our legal team, and consider giving to help fund our lawsuit!

On behalf of our clients, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, Virginia Medical Freedom Alliance, and Meagan Kade, FFLC is asking the court for a preliminary injunction to prevent the certification of the election results. Our lawsuit alleges that the proposed amendment is procedurally defective and that the question posed to voters on the ballot is deceptive. (Learn more about the case here.) The hearing will be presided over by Judge Hurley, who made headlines earlier this year after he ruled that the redistricting amendment was unconstitutional on similar grounds.

According to Josh Hetzler, Executive Director of FFLC, “We are excited for the opportunity to get into court right after the election, if necessary. Not only would this proposed abortion amendment be a disaster for policy reasons, but it would also undermine trust in our democratic processes because of the flawed and deceptive means by which it will have passed. We cannot allow that to happen.”

And in other news, last week our legal team also filed a lawsuit in Prince William County Circuit Court challenging – on the identical procedural grounds – the lawfulness of the proposed state constitutional amendment that seeks to redefine marriage and insert gender ideology language, which is also set to be decided on the November 3 election. The lawsuit was brought on behalf of Pastor Ben Purves.

You can learn more about this case on our website here.

These are exciting and trying times in our Commonwealth. Thank you for supporting us as we fight for life and marriage on your behalf!”

This is important information as we continue the fight for freedom in Virginia.

The election is next week. Tuesday, November 3rd, the polls open at 6 am and close at 7 pm. Please vote on election day and encourage your friends and neighbors to vote. (Read more.)

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The True Origins of Halloween

From The Crossroads Initiative:

We’ve all heard the allegations. Halloween is a pagan rite dating back to some pre-Christian festival among the Celtic Druids that escaped Church suppression. Even today modern pagans and witches continue to celebrate this ancient festival. If you let your kids go trick-or-treating, they will be worshiping the devil and pagan gods.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The origins of Halloween are, in fact, very Christian and rather American. Halloween falls on October 31 because of a pope, and its observances are the result of medieval Catholic piety.

It’s true that the ancient Celts of Ireland and Britain celebrated a minor festival on Oct. 31 — as they did on the last day of most other months of the year. However, Halloween falls on the last day of October because the Feast of All Saints or “All Hallows” falls on Nov. 1. The feast in honor of all the saints in heaven used to be celebrated on May 13, but Pope Gregory III (d. 741) moved it to Nov. 1, the dedication day of All Saints Chapel in St. Peter’s at Rome. Later, in the 840s, Pope Gregory IV commanded that All Saints be observed everywhere. And so the holy day spread to Ireland. The day before was the feast’s evening vigil, “All Hallows Even” or “Hallowe’en.” In those days, Halloween didn’t have any special significance for Christians or for long-dead Celtic pagans. (Read more.)

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