Classic Christmas Stories

by Frank Galgay

  The letter pointed out that many of the girls were from the outports and had to pay board at the rate of $10.50 per week, leaving them only $4.50 a week left over.

  There were some signs of the beginning of women’s lib in those days, however.

  An advertisement in mid-December said that a lady painter and paper hanger was looking for work by day or night.

  Those were also the days of the “Newfie Bullet” and large herds of caribou, and they met up with each other more than once.

  A report from an engineer on the railway in late December indicated that a train had been held up while a herd of some 300 caribou crossed the tracks in front of it and all the passengers got out of the train to watch them rumble by.

  In view of next year’s planned festivities, which include a Miss Celebration contest to select a provincial queen, it is interesting to note that in 1948, following a series of contests around the province throughout the year, a Miss Mary Dawe of Bay Roberts was chosen as the Beauty Queen of the Island on Dec. 29.

  This presents, perhaps, somewhat of a glimpse of the scene in Newfoundland, particularly St. John’s, 25 years ago, as Newfoundlanders, whether they liked it or not, prepared to change their nationality from Newfoundlander to Canadian.

  In an editorial on Dec. 31, 1948, the Telegram said that Newfoundland “stands to gain in many ways, and Newfoundland will make no small contribution to Canada’s prestige.”

  The editorial suggested that “with animosities forgotten, ” and a common resolve to strive to bring to pass “that great and bright future which all of us believe is rightly due Newfoundland, we shall enter the new era in our history without misgiving and with hope that in union will be found greater strength.”

  The Christmas Sausages

  by Jim Furlong

  WE WERE MUCH YOUNGER then and things were simpler. They weren’t necessarily better but were at least easier to understand. It was Christmas and we were a long ways from home. We were living, actually, in that most wonderful of places at Christmas, which is London, England. This was the same London where the spirit of Christmas was given life through the immortal pen of Charles Dickens. We lived in South Kensington at the time, which is just a quick subway ride away from the same Camden Town where Dickens’ Bob Cratchit lived. It was all very English and Christmasy and special. It was quite different from Canada’s Christmas, although a lot of our traditions are English in origin. The shops were all decorated for the season just like here, and the “Christmas illuminations, ” as they were called, were a matter of great pride among the big department stores like Marks and Spencer, Harrods, or Heal’s down on Tottenham Court Road. Santa was different too. He wasn’t called Santa but rather Father Christmas, and even his clothes differed from those of the Santa of North America. Father Christmas wore a robe with a hood and the robe went all the way to the floor. The Santa we know in North America started that way but changed. The modern fat Santa is really descended from a Coca Cola ad in the 1920s, but he is still a nice guy.

  We didn’t have much money but enough for a present each. We were poor as church mice but were working and were able to afford a cold water bed-sitting room that cost all of six pounds a week. It was a lot of money when you consider that a weekly wage was about twelve and a half pounds. At that time that would have been about twenty-five or thirty dollars. Our bed-sitter was on the sixth floor of a six-storey building and the bathroom was on the fifth and was shared by two floors of people. The “people” were mostly students, drifters, pensioners, and the odd hooker. I know because one of them ran a flourishing trade from a room on the same floor as the bathroom. I thought she was just popular until my landlady told me about the traffic up and down the stairs. The landlady didn’t care as long as the woman had the six pounds every week.

  Being poor didn’t mean we weren’t happy at Christmas, and that is the whole point of this piece, really. Christmas is a time of plenty in our world, but it is all a matter of perspective. On Christmas Day we took the tube (District Line) down to Victoria Station and then walked in the frosty morning up to Buckingham Palace. We could see our breath in the cold Christmas air. We wondered if the Queen and Prince Philip and Prince Charles and Princess Anne were up opening presents. On we went to St. James’s Park and then through to Trafalgar Square. Between there and our last stop at Piccadilly there was a coffee shop open, so we stopped and had tea and toast. The shop was open apparently because it was near a hospital and catered not only to visitors but to staff as well. London was ours. It was Christmas morning and there were very few people around, but everyone we met, man, woman, or child, wished us a Merry Christmas. At Piccadilly we sat for a while and then got the tube back home to South Ken.

  Now, in those days fresh meat was a real treat in London’s working world. Some things were remarkably cheap, like mushrooms or Danish bacon. Something to do with the Common market, I think. Some other things were expensive, and fresh meat was one of them. It wasn’t part of our daily diet. This, however, was Christmas and a time to celebrate. In our one-room flat there was no stove, just a hot plate. It operated by way of a meter where when you inserted coins into a slot it gave you a measured amount of electricity. The meter had to be fed for the lights and for the hot plate to work. Now, I don’t have to tell you that you can’t cook a turkey or a roast on a hot plate. That didn’t matter. We had a pound and a half of big fresh and large beef sausages instead. We had creamed potatoes with lots of butter and we even had a Christmas pudding. The pudding was in a tin, which we heated on the hot plate and then left in a bowl of hot water while the sausages were cooking.

  What a feast! It was wonderful. Was it any less than the Christmas dinner I’ll have this year? Like most people we’ll have turkey and dressing and gravy and cranberry sauce. We’ll have a hot steamed pudding with custard. Will that be any greater a celebration of the Christmas season than sausages, cream potatoes, and tinned Christmas pudding in a cold water London flat? I don’t think so, because it is Christmas and it is very special. Celebration and the concept of “plenty” at Christmas are very much a matter of perspective. Enjoy this happy and holy season.

  The Ghosts of Christmas Past (An Essay on Christmas)

  by Jim Furlong

  I LOVE CHRISTMAS IN all its aspects. I am endlessly fascinated and in a way haunted by it, and the older I get the more I marvel and wonder at the hold it has over our society. It is that concept of “wonder” that is really the central theme of the Christmas season, and each passing year has me deep in thought on how its celebration endures. What strikes me as odd is that, as the years drift by, this yuletide introspection seems to grow.

  Why is that? Why does Christmas gnaw away at me? It may be linked to the idea of the Christmas feast being one of those major signposts in our lives that lasts through what are sometimes called “the ages of man.” Your first day of school or your graduation or your first job or your first love are all signposts from a particular period in your existence. While memories are intense, they are of a single specific event. Christmas, however, spans the aforementioned “ages of man” and provides continuity and important linkage between past and present.

  We all remember the Christmas of our childhood and the assorted Christmases that have accompanied us along the path to where we are today. In just a few years Christmas evolves from something looked forward to with eager anticipation to something else altogether. As the rolling years accumulate it becomes a season that we view often through life’s rear-view mirror smiling back at the string of Christmases that strung together have become our life story. You can start a great conversation at any Christmas gathering by asking everyone about what may have been his or her favourite toy or his or her special Christmas memory. Eyes grow gently moist as people dip deep into their memory banks and, with the story of a sometimes simple gift, rekindle that most precious of aspects of the human spirit—wonder. That is Christmas.

  For me there are the memories of Toyland and church. I am old enough to r
emember what were really the first “Toylands.” They were part of the great mercantile houses of Water Street like Bowring Brothers, Ayre and Sons, and all the rest. Going “downtown” was part of the Christmas pilgrimage that took Mom and my brother not only to department stores but to McMurdo’s or The Sweet Shop for fries or a chocolate sundae. Looking in the windows at the Christmas displays of the big stores was an important part of that as well. The department stores employed window dressers then, whose job it was to put forward the best commercial “foot” of the business for passersby to see. The Royal Stores and The London New York and Paris competed, as did Bowrings, Ayres, and others. Silver’s Jewellery on Water Street west stood out. It had a mechanized Santa display that made a couple of generations of little eyes open wide. I think that Santa played piano, although the clickety-clack of the tracks of time have made some memories “gauzy.” Window shopping plus a trip to one of half a dozen different raffles on Water Street were part of the adventure. “Two for five! Four for ten! Thirty cents a dozen!” I sense readers’ heads nodding in agreement, because it is a distinct St. John’s memory I share with many. It is part, really, of a postwar St. John’s Christmas outing where a family that had been frugal throughout the year was rewarded with a brief venture into the “world of purchase.”

  Toylands at “the shops” were a world of Mechano sets and guns and holsters and games of Ludo, Snakes and Ladders, and Parcheesi, and Blow Football, which was two straws and a plastic soccer ball. I remember well that little educational toy called The Magic Robot. He rested on a piece of mirrored glass and had a wand and you pointed the wand at a current events or history question on a piece of printed cardboard on the game and, when the robot moved to another mirror, he pointed at the correct answer. “What animal is known as ‘The ship of the desert’?” “The camel is known as ‘The ship of the desert.’” It all worked on a polarized magnet and within a few days you had all the answers memorized, but it was still wonderful and on the cutting edge of technology, because these were the days when the only computers in the world were ones that had either cracked “the Enigma code” in World War II or provided results on “The Sixty Four Thousand Dollar Question” in our single-channel television universe.

  Of course, all the toys of Toyland didn’t come to you at Christmas, but you did probably get one or two, because this was Christmas and it was, as it is now, a season of excess. All things being relative. There were electric trains, and microscopes, bubble makers, kaleidoscopes, and Monopoly games, and even some toys that have endured, like Tinker Toys and Etch-a-Sketch and Slinky. They stand almost as giants honoured in some toy pantheon.

  Going around to look at the Christmas lights in “town” was very much part of our secular Christmas ritual. It was like looking in the window of someone who had “more.” My aunt had a car and our family didn’t, so we went with her. Most homes didn’t have Christmas lights except a candle in the window, but a few, like the Pippy property on Waterford Bridge Road, did. The Sanatorium lights with the big Christmas tree and the Christmas Seal sign was always a highlight, as was their manger scene. The “San, ” as it was called, was a threat from many a parent. “If you don’t eat your carrots you’ll end up in ‘the San’ before you are fifteen.”

  Christmas was a season you knew was different on many levels from the others, and it wasn’t just in toys and lights. Some foods made their way into the home to let you know it was Christmas. There were chocolates, of course. A nice box of Ganongs where you slyly pushed on the chocolate to find “a hard one.” There were other candies too, like Liquorice Allsorts. It was a very British candy, as were “chicken bones” and “humbugs.” Nobody liked them and they were always the last ones left. There were salted nuts, maybe even cashews, and special baked goods that only appeared at Christmas, like cheese straws and marmalade cookies, dark cake and cherry cake. There was, of course, turkey and ham and Christmas pudding and those Christmas crackers with the tiny prize inside. There was Purity raspberry syrup that for reasons I never understood only made it into the house at Christmas, although it is sold year-round. Come to think of it, I only buy it at Christmas now. Olives fit into that once-a-year category, and so do boxes of fancy English biscuits.

  Accompanying all of that was religion. We were deep then in the grip of Holy Mother Church, for better or for worse. In those days our house had an Advent wreath just as we had one in school. I doubt if there is a house in all of Newfoundland that has one now. There were four candles and each was lit in succession during the four weeks leading up to Christmas. They, like vigil lights placed before statues of the Blessed Virgin in our homes, have vanished, no doubt because there are regulations that would promptly get your fire insurance cancelled if you used them. We also had a “crib” which was used every year. The individual pieces were wrapped carefully in paper, and bringing them out for the season was ceremonial and very much a part of our family liturgy. On Christmas Eve, of course, we went to midnight Mass at St. Patrick’s in the heart of the west end. There were five priests there then. In those days, to go to Holy Communion, as it was called, you had to fast from midnight the night before. You would be pretty hungry by Mass at eight in the morning, but for midnight Mass you only had to fast for an hour or so. Mass was all in Latin then from start to finish. Christmas carols and Gregorian chant. I still know “Adeste Fideles” in Latin from start to finish. With bells and incense, it all added to the great mystery of the whole thing. There were some people in church that hadn’t been there since last year. They were “Christmas Christians, ” but that didn’t matter because they too were welcome.

  After Mass we went home and ate. We called it steak, but it wasn’t really. It was stewing beef that had been simmering on the stove during the time we were in church. Mass is over, your stomach is full, and stretching ahead the prospect of Christmas morning and opening presents. We were told that only uncivilized people opened presents on Christmas Eve. “Back-laners, ” Mom called them. That’s an ancient name that references an imagined St. John’s social structure and the maze of little intersecting streets that crawl up the hill from New Gower Street to Lemarchant Road.

  Where has it all gone? Well, I don’t think it has gone anywhere. We still go to Mass Christmas Eve. We have our own rituals and traditions, from bringing out the “crib” to getting the Christmas tree to putting the angel on the top of the tree. It is the same angel that was in my home when I was boy. On our tree once again this year, an old set of lights that has been in our family for sixty years. That continuity is important. It is part of ritual and celebration.

  In Christmas we still, as we always did both in an out of church, wrestle with the eternal questions. They are about the birth of an Infant in a manger and about how Santa Claus gets down the chimney. Those questions are both valid because they speak to the human capacity and ability to inquire and to take us places beyond the known universe. They speak to the notion of wonder and miracles.

  Certainly the Christmas season itself is a miracle. It brings out the best in we much-flawed humans. At Christmas people are simply nicer to one another. The police will tell you that even criminals take a break. There is very little crime because of Christmas, because people turn their minds, however briefly, to something else. Our “gentler angels” reveal themselves. Call me simple-minded, but I think on some important level the clerk in the store that says “Merry Christmas” or the waiter at the restaurant that wishes me “the best of the holidays” really means it. They wish me well at Christmas. So it is that we go from being children, to having children, to raising children, and to finally letting them go. Our lives measured by time passages and through all of that there is Christmas. Through all of that there is a happy and holy season where there is celebration and plenty and, as there has been for two thousand years or so . . . wonder.

  Christmas in the Far North

  by L. A. W.

  CHRISTMAS HAS THE SAME meaning to every true English heart, the same secret mystery surrounds the
word, whether it be kept under the burning sun of India or Australia, or amid the ice and snow of the frozen North.

  The children dream of that strange, mysterious being called Santa Claus, who comes at night when all are asleep, and gently, noiselessly, leaves his gifts, and then withdraws as silently as he came.

  The maiden dreams of the holly, with its bright red clusters, and the mistletoe, with its pale green leaves and pure white berries, fit emblem of a maiden’s heart.

  Christmas in the Far North is, however, very different from that spent in warmer climes. I will try and describe one of the many pleasant ones I have spent on the coast of Labrador, far away from the old land I used to call “home.”

  Christmas and Easter are the two great events of the year, and for them great preparation is made. The house is thoroughly cleaned from top to bottom, and everything made bright and shining.

  For weeks before Christmas the days are counted by the young people, and the thermometer constantly inspected to see if it is getting colder; when down to zero there is great delight, as the ice will be good for travelling.

  The girls are whispering together, and a great part of the time are invisible, except at meals. There are no shops or stores near in this part of the world, so the presents and keep-sakes, little tokens of love and friendship, must be made by their own fair fingers, and as they are not to be seen by the owners till the Christmas morning, it requires some little manoeuvring to keep them out of sight.

  The boys, meantime, are busy learning their recitations, making new strings for their “rackets” (snow-shoes), painting up the coach-box, making a new whip, which is quite a long affair, as it is made of seal-skin prepared in a particular manner.