The first family picture I framed of Patrick, Maud and me was actually a newspaper clipping. It was taken at the CHCO television studio at Christmastime during the COVID-19 pandemic. There’s a nutcracker behind us, part of the set for the Santa’s Helpers telethon. Looking at it now, I can remember that strange season when so much of our connection to one another had to happen from a distance.
I didn’t know when we took the photograph that it would later have an even deeper meaning for us.
Back then, CHCO-TV, and The Saint Croix Courier, which had been known as the local newspaper since 1865, were separately-owned, independent media outlets serving the same corner of New Brunswick. We were proud to call the people at The Courier our colleagues. In a province where so much of the media belonged to the same company, there was something special about Charlotte County having both its own independent community television station and an independent newspaper.
During the pandemic, those connections mattered more than ever. At CHCO, we were doing live daily television updates, press conferences, weekly TV Bingo and, when Christmas came, the telethon. We were finding ways to keep people connected while so many of us were at home. Our colleagues at The Courier were doing the same through the paper.
I think that was when I began to understand just how big our family here really is.
Our friend Kristi Marples, who was the editor of The Courier at the time, reached out about a Christmas spread featuring familiar faces from across Charlotte County. Would we send a family photo of Patrick, Maud and me, along with Christmas wishes for the community?
There was something lovely about being asked. Here was another newsroom seeing us as friends and neighbours, people working toward the same goal of keeping this place connected. In media, that’s the exception and not the rule. And here was someone asking for a family photograph with the easy understanding that our family included our dog.
We sent the picture.
When it appeared in the paper, the caption introduced us as “Our good friends from CHCO-TV,” named Patrick and me, and finished with “and of course, Maud.”
Of course, Maud.
Those three words touched my heart in a way I hadn’t expected.
Of course she belonged in our family picture. But there was another kind of familiarity in that caption, too. Maud needed very little introduction. She had sat beside us through the telethon. She made weekly appearances on TV Bingo and many unplanned cameos on a number of television programs. People knew her from the station, from television, from seeing us around town. Somehow, our dog had become everyone’s dog.
Krisi had captured all of that in three words.
I bought extra copies of the paper, cut out the photograph and framed it, the way you do when something in the newspaper matters to you. For many people, that’s just nostalgia, but here in Charlotte County, we still had our newspaper.
That is something The Courier has done for generations of families here. Its pages become the clippings we save, the photographs we tuck away, the little records of people and moments we don’t want to lose.
So when the paper’s future was in jeopardy, and people in the community asked whether CHCO could help save it, we understood what was at stake.
We would have loved for The Courier to continue with separate owners, with another independent newsroom working alongside ours. But we couldn’t bear to see it disappear.
We brought it under CHCO’s umbrella because it was already part of the family of this place. In a way, we were simply making room for a member of the family who needed us.
Now I look at that photograph in my living room and think about everything that has happened since it was taken. At the time, it was just our little family at the television station, sending Christmas wishes through our friends at the newspaper. None of us knew how closely our futures would become tied together.
Maud, of course, was already perfectly at home in both.
I’m glad I left the caption visible in the cutout I framed: “Our good friends from CHCO-TV.” Long before we took responsibility for The Courier, the people making it had given us something worth framing: a reminder that we belonged.
And when the time came, we wanted to do the same for them.
Because family looks out for family.
