This year's Canberra centenary has generated some ripples that will go on rippling for years to come. So will Oliphant's window, a centenary commission, which is to go in a building that is not even on the drawing board yet.

The window is a centenary present from the War Widows Guild of Australia (ACT) to the Canberra Services Club. But of course the dear old wooden building that housed the club burned down in 2011.

But Oliphant has got to work already and has begun by making a small glass maquette (an exact model) of what will be a window two metres high.

''They [the guild] wanted somebody to make a window for the new Services Club to commemorate the role that the War Widows have played in all our past and present armed conflicts,'' said Oliphant. ''I was delighted to do it. I feel a strong connection to the War Widows and to the Services Club. My grandfather Ken Oliphant was an architect in Canberra and he spent a lot of time at the Services Club. He'd fought in the First World War and it affected him greatly. So the Services Club was a huge support for him. He later died of injuries relating to that war, and so my grandma was supported by Legacy. So she was a war widow with a war widow's pension.

''So, what I really wanted to capture with the window was the idea of the support that War Widows provides to these women. It's support for life. The guild's emblem is the kookaburra and the reason they chose it is because the kookaburra is fiercely loyal and mates for life. It's always laughing but it protects its young until its dying breath.

''So, what I wanted to do was show the War Widows, represented by the kookaburra, supporting these women. The kookaburra is holding the woman [to its breast] with its wings in a loving embrace.''

As for the timeless (but vaguely 1930s-ish) woman of the window: ''What I really wanted for her was a strength but a softness.

''There's a real strength about these women. They've supported their husbands and those husbands have died and there's a real grace and beauty about them and I wanted that encapsulated in her [the woman in the window]. I wanted the window to have that feel of windows in a great memorial [Napier Waller's famous figures at the Australian War Memorial were a kind of example]. The guild wanted something like that. They wanted something that will memorialise.

''The colours [of the overall window] are the colours of a kookaburra. I really spent a long time looking at kookaburras. They have these beautiful greys and browns, and that blue.''

A little entranced, your columnist ogled and ogled the lovely maquette from top to bottom and at the very bottom discovered, with a boyish whoop of delight, tiny reddish-pink flowers of our centenary shrub the ''Canberra Bells''.

''Yes, the guild really wanted those in the window because they wanted it marked as a centenary gift and that's what the correas do. And when of course the window is full-size the woman will be life-sized and the correas will be slightly larger than life-sized and they will tie the window to this year, 2013.''

Hallelujah! Some of us sense the approach of Christmas not from hearing bad American Christmas music being played in shopping malls but from noticing in our hearts a seasonal lust to attend a performance of Handel's Messiah. Happily, there is at least one Canberra Messiah coming up. Details in a moment.

Of course Messiah audiences observe tradition and stand for the Hallelujah chorus (just as the mightily-impressed King George II did when he first heard it). And yet, it may be that lots of the Canberrans who attended a special performance of the Messiah at the Methodist National Memorial Church (today's Wesley Uniting Church) in Forrest at Christmas in 1956 didn't get up out of their seats. Why? It was because it was a kind of drive-in Messiah and would have required them to get out of their cars and stand beside them as the uplifting chorus rang out.

On Christmas Eve 1956 The Canberra Times reported that ''A recording of the famous Huddersfield Choral Society singing Handel's Messiah will be amplified from the tower of the Methodist National Memorial Church on Christmas Night. The recorded choir is conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent. It is expected that many Canberra residents will hear the presentation either from their cars or in the church grounds.''

Canberra was primitive (but quaint) in 1956 (going out to hear gramophone records played from a church tower!). But in 2013 we can attend the live Canberra Choral Society performance of the Messiah at 7.30pm on Saturday December 14 indoors at the Llewellyn Hall.

Sir Malcolm Sargent (1895-1967) has long since gone to his Great Reward so this performance will be conducted by accomplished Messiah tragic and geek Graham Abbott.

Tickets from Ticketek.