This evening was my final Masonic event of 2025. I am all done until next year.

I ended the year with Wrexhamian Chapter. The plan for the evening was to do a demonstration of an exhalation ceremony. To gives the new officers a chance to practice their roles ready for a live candidate at our next meeting. Only we had so many people call off that the majority of the officers were past Zerubbabel’s standing in. It was a pointless idea to do a demo with so many Past Z’s in place, and they decided to do the full signs and everything. Most of us there thought that we should call it a miss and have a chat, or an informal evening due to the numbers. But the DC was insistent,  It was so bad that the Grand Chapter Officer (and Assistant PGM) who was down decided he was not staying, and took his regalia off and went home before we even opened the Chapter.

We used to be the largest normal Chapter in North Wales, and yet this evening we only just had enough people to open the chapter. I think we need to find out why our members never turn up. I suspect it is boredom, we only do the one ceremony (ignoring Installation), and we do it EVERY MEETING!. I think we need to have the occasional meeting with an interesting Chapter talk, or maybe just do the three lecturers and let the newer members each take a third of one of the lecturers. Currently we only do one, and it is normally done by the same Past Z’s who are also doing the ceremony. 

Basically people join, then spend years just sitting on the side-lines watching the same people do the same ritual every meeting. I would find that boring. We need to engage with them more, and make the Chapter more than the “one trick pony” that a lot of masons have taken to calling it. I started working on people this evening, and saying we need to do more. So maybe 2026 will be the year of Wrexhamian Chapter.