"Biblical scholars hotly contest a question to which there is no obvious or certain answer: on which day did God create cigars?
Why this problem should be the object of such heated debate, especially given the paucity of textual evidence, is anyone’s guess. It is clear that, absent anything definitive in the textus receptus, Right Reason alone (that is to say, reason informed by caritas) must be our guide.
Now I’m not going to say anything more about the originary problem—for that is not my concern here—than that I would place the creation of cigars somewhere near The Beginning for the simple reason that it’s hard to imagine the fiat lux echoing more than a couple of times before someone thought to touch the lux to some really fine, cured and carefully rolled tobacco.
So: light, then men, then vegetation. Cigars almost certainly followed fast upon these three.
The problem is, so did women, which is why in the fullness of time Chesterton was obliged to say, “most of us have heard the voice in which the hostess tells her husband not to sit too long over the cigars. It is the dreadful voice of Love seeking to destroy Comradeship.”
Notwithstanding the small number of women who willingly suffer their men to linger over the cigars (Mom! They don’t make ‘em like you anymore!), and indeed the even smaller number of women who actually smoke them (I’m not sure where I stand on this—for obvious reasons), it is generally the case, near as I can tell, that women were created mainly to keep men from enjoying themselves too much over the cigars.
...Whereupon the men will adjourn. They won’t fully enjoy themselves, of course, because they know that what they’re about to do will set them back a bit, but they’ll adjourn nonetheless. Consequence is something they’ve learned to suffer willingly.
Now if you’re going to risk the consequences, there are three things you must keep in mind as you buy your three or four nights in the doghouse: the third is the kind of cigar itself; the second is what to put in the snifter; the first is where to go.
As for the third: if you’re rich, buy good cigars. Really really good ones. I have no experience of them, so my advice is limited to this: ask someone who knows.
But if you are not rich, find a middling cigar that won’t scorch your tongue or send you reeling. On these two commands hang all the law and the prophets. And truth be told you don’t actually need the kind of cigar you find between the hairy knuckles and gaudy rings of some fat cat golf hack. A Churchill reject will do the job just fine. Occasionally you’ll get one that won’t smoke, so you might want to get two just in case, but don’t break the bank just because someone in some magazine has said disparaging things about all us cheap bastards. We cheap bastards are doing just fine.
But of course you don’t want an over-the-counter cigar that comes in a little three-quarter box with cellophane over it. That’s beneath human dignity. It’s for bait fishermen who have never wielded a fly rod..."
Jason Peters - Front Porch Republic
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